Bookgazing

Bookish Chat: 'Iron Council' - China Mieville

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:12:37 GMT

Maree and I continue our mission to fangirl about all the words from China Mieville. Today we’re talking about ‘Iron Council’, the final book in Mieville’s loosely connected Bas-Lag series.

M: Iron Council feels like a genre-fuck novel - not as much as The City & The City but it's certainly far from conventional.

J: In

the interview Mieville did with Charles Burns at ‘The Believer’ (the one I sent you originally, capslocking ‘There’s a China Mieville novel that features a GAY PROTAGONIST!’, which is the reason we ended up reading ‘Iron Council before all the other Bas-Lag books) it's mentioned that ‘Iron Council’ is sort of a western, so I guess it's an SF mash-up of that genre. That western SF mash-up is then mashed up again with a whole heap of Russian socialist imagery. I guess most people are kind of familiar with the western SF from programs like ‘Firefly’, films like ‘Star Wars’ and most recently ‘Cowboys and Aliens’ (need to see, DON'T CARE IF IT SUCKS, SF AND WESTERNS WERE MEANT TO BE TOGETHER), so we could say it's building on a foundation rather than creating a new genre crossover.

As I read more of Mieville’s books and I find it interesting to reflect on some of the reactions I’ve seen to the novels he wrote both before and after ‘The City & The City’. Like I said when we were reading ‘Kraken’ together, I kept seeing reviews which were all over how original ‘TC&TC’'s genre fucking was and... I mean, I loved that book for so many other reasons (I think we both did, although we were pretty shell shocked by the time we finished ‘TC&TC’, but it seems pretty weird to suggest that the genre crossover part is the site of all its originality. It's building on a respected, much more classical tradition of mixing hard-boiled detective elements with SF (come on, if Philip K Dick has done it, it’s a classic approach). It's a great genre-fuck (loving this term, will now over use it) and a great book, but I get kind of itchy when people praise ‘TC&TC’ for the originality of its genre fucking, alongside a critique of the unoriginality/lack of genre redefinition of Mieville's other books. Like, ‘Iron Council’ may be building on an established genre mashup tradition, but I get edgy when I see its sense of originality unfavourably compared to ‘TC&TC’. ‘TC&TC’ is great, but it’s not the second coming - you know?

M: Sci fi and Westerns are like an arranged marriage that actually turns out to be a happy one because come on Star Wars is just a WESTERN IN SPACE. TC&TC is a great book and he's blended two previously disparate genres. It's a genre-fuck but I think originality is overused. Pfffft ... those are the people who don't like Kraken I bet, or call it "conventional." Uh, no. Plus I like the fact he blends genres/fucks with them - like he just expects them to bend to his will and do whatever he wants with them.

J: This. Hello, westerns and SF just fit. I would love more projects where these genres are actively combined and then messed about with/fannishly critiqued by their own narratives. How did you feel about the combination of Western and Russian in particular?

M: I think that's a great fusion actually. Westerns are - at their simplest level - about good v evil and there's that striving in socialist Russia as well (about which I know next to nothing.) Whatever genre you're writing - or whatever genres you're fusing, good v evil and The Man v the revolutionaries is always familiar. And I don't mean that in a bad way - I think it's a good thing we can recognise those things in Iron Council.

I like how it started out with a quest of sorts like your average fantasy novel, and then Mieville immediately subverts it into something else. To start with, I had no real idea what Cutter was doing or where he was going, but I was fully on board from the start because I LOVE Cutter.

J: How does anyone not love Cutter? He's the emotional heart of this novel (along with Ori, when he appears later on). It’s kind of refreshing to see a novel of Mieville's where there is an honest to god, out in the open, emotional aspect. ‘Kraken’'s emotions are kind of sublimated, at least I thought so. It's all very 'we have feelings, but we don't talk about them until everyone is DEAD'. You feel all that repression, which is what makes the emotional connection with the reader and stops that book from being dead inside, but no one is going to hand you emotional access on a plate (at least that's how it feels to me). ‘Iron Council’ puts at least some of its feelings on the table. Cutter loves Judah. Ori is angry and frustrated. We can get that about them, we can connect in an almost traditional way with them and this is different from the two other novels of Mieville's we’ve read together, where I feel the reader is mostly forced to be disconnected from the character’s inner emotional states.

M: I like sublimated for Kraken because the whole book does feel kind of submerged almost - like you're reading it through distorted glass, so it's distancing.

J: I actually worry about ‘Railsea’ a lot because of that disconnected emotional side of Mieville’s characterisation...like is that going to work in a YA book?

M: You should read his other YA novel, Un Lun Dun - it's really cleverly done and the main character is a kick-ass girl who refuses to give up. I didn't realise that Railsea was YA and based on how much I loved Un Lun Dun I'm even more excited for it - lol.

Anyway, Cutter is definitely the emotional heart that drives the novel, even though I don't think he really has any clue what he's doing or why. He's driven primarily by his feelings for Judah who doesn't even - can we talk for a moment about how irritating Judah is? I get that he was a founding member of the Iron Council and everything but he's a martyr looking for a cause and as for what he DOES to the Iron Council ... I still can't get my head around that.

J: Judah :P I found him mildly irritating during the whole biography section, but the things that irritated me were also things that made me feel sympathetic towards him, if that makes sense. In the sections set in Judah’s past, he is well intentioned (eventually) but he makes mistakes – d’aww. But present Judah is so...present Judah what is your deal? I want to like him, because he’s so on it when it comes to political activity, but I don’t and I think the book wants to make us distanced from him (Cutter is the reader’s access character right?). He’s just...he acts so saintly. And he’s just helping a friend out when he sleeps with Cutter. Like, how awful is that?! He’s a person so devoid of the capability to give anything of himself to personal romantic relationships, because he’s been swallowed by a cause and it makes him behave like a total marty bastard towards Cutter. But he still seems to love, like really love Ann Hari. Do you think he loves her because she’s so connected to the cause, or because of their shared history, or is Judah really showing a spark of romantic emotion for a person when he’s with her?

M: I do go back and forth on Judah and Ann Hari. They had shared cause when the Iron Council was being formed and he genuinely does seem to have some kind of deep feelings for her, but I - and I'm aware I'm being a bit childish with this - can't like him because of how he treats Cutter, who's so vulnerable to Judah.

J: No, no, I totally get that reaction. His characterisation makes him a very interesting character, even sympathetic, but still not a guy we’re going to crawl all over with love. I’m not sure I’d have the book without Judah, just because he makes everything else so complicated, but from a pure fannish love perspective I for sure wish Cutter wasn’t quite so tied to him.

M: I agree. Judah's kind of a necessary evil. And I don't mean that he's evil but Cutter needs something or someone to drive him to what he does, and that's been Judah for so long, I don't think he even hesitates before following him into god-knows-where.

Cutter is a roil of feelings the whole time and I think he's lonely. He goes out looking for connection after connection, and as much as he loves Judah, he's still looking for someone to reciprocate and that's what he deserves.For me, all through the novel, I feel like Cutter is looking for something. He's so very .... yearning?

Hrm.

J: Maree, I can't even explain how I feel about Cutter and his place in this book articulately. I agree though, he needs...something, but I’m not sure whether it’s love from one person, acceptance from the whole world, a purpose/cause, the ability to believe, or just not be isolated by his spiky nature. Maybe it's all of those things. Maybe Cutter is an everyman character, just trying to work out where he fits into life, like all human beings do. What do you think?

M: He's very much an everyman character. He believes he's fuelled by his love for Judah but is he really or has that consistent rejection just become something of a habit? I think he's kind of an emotional masochist but I love him for the fact that he never gives up. He loves Judah and that's all there is to it.

J: Ooooooooooooooooo. Good point. This is probably part of why I like him so much. I am awfully into characters who want to make other people feel things they aren't interested in feeling at all. I’m sure that indicates some delightful things about my own psychology.

M: And he just keeps doing it. I could see him - at the end of the book - hooking up with someone else who's just as bad for him as Judah was, because I don't think Cutter knows how to look for someone who's going to make him happy.

What I love is that.... Cutter's gay but it's not ... ugh. Central? I'm having trouble articulating what I mean but it's just there, like the fact of being tall, or having brown hair. He's the central character of the novel and he's gay and it's so RARE but I love the fact that Mieville doesn't make a big thing out of it - like he's just a character and an everyman and it just so happens the person he's in love with has the same anatomy.

J: YES! I don’t think he was ever going to find that person to make him happy in a Mieville world and definitely not in the specific world of ‘Iron Council’, because of this book’s western influences. There’s a particular kind of repressed emotional vibe to westerns and although I don’t know enough to talk about how that translates into westerns which feature gay relationships, I suspect that literature is probably full of ‘You’re not gay, unless you feel something’ narratives. Like I said above, I think Mieville often writes books which put the characters inner emotions beyond the reach of the reader, so factoring that in and recognising the western SF connections, I was pretty sure Cutter would never find a man who wants to be his emotional partner in this book.

I’m finding it hard to parse what feels like the sad narrative inevitability of Cutter’s romantic disappointment in relation to ideas Mieville’s comment in ‘The Believer’ interview, that Cutter and Judah’s relationship is a romance. Like their relationship is tragic; a seriously tragic example of unrequited love and the patronising allowance of attachment. The bitterness created by Judah’s inadequate reaction to Cutter’s feelings is always present. I’m not saying it isn’t a romance, but it’s one of the saddest damn romances in the world.

M: Agreed. Cutter and Judah's relationship is fairly doomed from the start and while I don't necessarily like that for Cutter's sake, I get that it was inevitable. And while it works here, it doesn't mean that I have to like it. I almost wish there was a fix-it story for Cutter's next phase of his life, but does that undermine his character in some way?

J: And I’m struggling to work out how Cutter/Judah’s relationship functions as a depiction of gay characters in literature, when there are still so few books published that include a gay hero. The tragic romance works for Mieville's chosen style and genre. At the same time, Cutter is placed in a position where he’s incapable of finding happiness, which is an uncomfortable place for us to see any gay character right now. I mean the weight of literature is just now in the process of switching from a position where every story with a gay character had to end tragically, to a more hopeful place. Like, is now the right time in history for a tragic story where a gay character’s romantic hopes are crushed and a bisexual character dies? If the tragedy of the book isn’t centred around the characters being gay or bisexual (for example, if the tragedy isn’t something like them being beaten up because of their sexuality, but is a political tragedy they just happen to be involved in) do these concerns need to come into how we evaluate the book?

M: I think that's the central, possibly unanswerable question. Is now the time? But if not now, then when, really? Maybe this is crucial, but maybe it's just another story with a sad ending.

J: Does setting Judah up as a distant saint, who won’t connect with Cutter because of that aspect of his character, rather than a guy who won’t connect with Cutter because he’s ashamed/believes in the ‘fuck don’t feel’ model for men, subvert stuff (oh I’m so specific, sigh this is hard to work through)? Well, yes. And Cutter is alive at the end of the novel so this book avoids defaulting into the ‘dead gay character’ trope (although there’s a dead bi-sexual main character, so...and that death places a lot of tragedy in Cutter’s life that’s relate to his relationship with Judah...). It’s really difficult to judge, so I guess I’ll just offer open ended exploration and wait to hear your thoughts.

M: I was relieved to be honest that Cutter was alive at the end. Broken-hearted, sure, but alive. As for Judah ... he was always setting himself up to be the martyr to the cause. His ending was inevitable in a way, I think. He wanted to be that for the Iron Council, and that rendered his other relationships - Cutter, and even Ann Hari - moot. I'm possibly projecting because as necessary a character as Judah is, I will never not be angry with him. Ori breaks my heart a little bit - he's so very much the quintessential angry young man looking for something to fight for. I get his frustration with the Double R and why he was so perfect to fall into Spiral Jacob's hands.

J: I need to think about what Judah does to the Iron Council at the end some more. See, I didn’t agree with Ann Hari’s direction for the revolution, but then when Judah preserved them I agreed with all her horror and rage. It’s difficult because Judah is a preservationist, but also a historian and I’m pretty tied to history (ex-history student). I understand his impulses to hold onto the council (so much slips away so easily as history progresses and the people who shape historical education/the historical knowledge of regular people, often ‘ensure’ that very particular things slip away - when people say history is written by the winners they aren’t wrong and often the winners are jerks about it). At the same time I have problems with what he does in this particular situation. Does pickling a movement that is still active take away its power/ the potential power of its doomed status, or does it save it from inevitable destruction? Hard.

Like Ann Hari says, we’ll never quite know how the trajectory of history would have turned out if the council had been publicly destroyed. At the same time history is made up of moments that have been averted, or missed, so to say that this intervention is definitely, especially troubling is difficult. Maybe it feels so wrong to me because it’s such an active intervention, whereas we’re used to interventions of circumstances, chance etc?

How are you doing getting your head around that aspect of the novel now?

M: Mmmm ... I can see your point of view. I'm not a historian but I get it, sort of. Also this: "pickling a moment that's still active, does it take away its power ..." that makes me wonder. Because the people of New Crobuzon will be able to see that train every day. At least some of them will know what it was - what it represented. And the Council still has Ann Hari as a living, breathing representation of that history, so maybe it's not as hopeless as it first seems - the ending of the rebellion, I mean. Judah renders the Council inert. But does he do the same for the revolution? Is there still a spark? Is he truly a martyr now?

J: It’s super hard to decide isn’t it? Oh, brain hurts, so let’s move on shall we?;P

The subversion of the quest narrative in this book is gorgeous. There are a couple of quests I think; there’s the quest to find Judah, the quest to find the Council, Ori's quest to find Toro, then his later attempt to stop Spiral Jacobs, the eventual desperate journey to stop the Council. None of these quests ever actually brings the story to though, do they? I feel like traditional quest narratives are usually brought to a head by a dramatic conclusion, which removes the need for further questing. In ‘Iron Council’ each quest ends, but then there's more to be done, more quests to go on. For example, ‘Kraken’ contains a more of a traditional quest narrative (Quest: save the world, Ending: accomplished, or failed). Here there's no ending, even though things end, right?

M: The ending definitely isn't resolved. It's a bit "the more things change the more they stay the same." There's rebellion and revolution no matter what, and a corrupt government running the militia. I did have a "what was the point of that then?" moment but it's so well written I can forgive that. Plus I do like a good subversion.

J: See this is where I think Renay would say stuff that would help us understand the ending, but I’m 90% sure that she will not be reading ‘Iron Council’. I remember things she said after reading ‘Kraken’, like:

‘I can't understand what changed for Dane to make this no-way-back, can't-be-undone decision make sense. You can't keep fighting if you're dead, which means it feels like at this point, the Krakenists simply gave up and decided to go down in a blaze of glory pumped full of delicious, form-altering ink.’

and this comment specifically:

‘I don't want to argue that Leon's death which sets so much in motion, plus the other deaths inflicted by Goss and Subby were less worthy, but they were consequences of getting involved in the Tattoo's business and not avoidable after the fact. Wati's death he made avoidable himself (ugh, I loved Wati, after the ladies he was my favorite). Dane's second (or third? I wasn't sure on the count there) death = totally avoidable! He choose it, so who am I to say, no, don't do it? But Billy was his friend, and did say, please don't do it, and he ignored him. Unfortunately for personal reasons, the book loses me at that point, because there's having a faith that's important to you and then tossing the care and concern of a friend back in their face, right? The book even makes the point that the kraken god doesn't ask them for anything, so what gives?’

and I think, isn’t that exactly what Ann Hari tries to do? She doesn’t think the council can win, but she tries to sacrifice herself anyway.

M: That's an excellent point, yes. In a way, Ann Hari is the true revolutionary - she's stayed with the Council, she rallied the women, she's the one who was going to crash the train into the city.

J: I wonder how Renay would react to Judah keeping the Iron Council from that kind of blaze of glory martyrdom, that ultimately might not achieve anything. The book points at Judah’s actions with horror, but I can totally see why the way he keeps the council from a pointless death could be viewed more sympathetically, even if I still have kind of squicky feelings about Judah’s intervention.

M: I wonder that, too to be honest. I keep cycling back to what he did and going but WHY did you do that? Was it to preserve the Council? Was it because it would mean he wouldn't be the martyr? Was it to save Ann Hari and the others? I can't help thinking his reasons were selfish, but once again, I might be projecting. Or was what he did in some way necessary? I don't know in what way, because I keep going but what was the POINT, Judah? If I ever meet Mr Mieville I'm going to have a list of questions a mile long. Once I can stop staring.

J: OMG, Maree, Ann Hari! ! - that is essentially my reaction to her. She’s amazing/destructive/angry, which I am all over, yet also so determined to martyr herself and her revolution, which is less amazing, more wtf.

M: Oh my god Ann Hari. I have mixed feelings about her but I love how she rallied all the women when they were still building the railroad. I'm running out of time now so I'll send this in a minute and we can get into our feelings properly.

J: I love that aspect of the novel. The prostitute’s revolution is just stunning and there are classical allusions to the Greek play Lysistrata, where the women refuse to have sex with their husbands (wouldn’t you know it is one of the few Greek plays we didn’t cover during my two years taking Classical Civillisations – must read). I just have all the feelings about it and the way Ann Hari becomes the leader of the revolution. Her comment that it was never Judah’s revolution to begin with just spoke so hard to me – it was always the women’s cause that came first.

M: Exactly. The women took action and when the men said this isn't your cause, she fought against that with - what was it? Then who's cause is it? We open our legs for you and bear your children, it's our cause moreso than it is yours - and then that's the catalyst for the real strike.

J: Got to say I think there’s a lot of Judah and Ann Hari combined into Dane from ‘Kraken’; her desire to embrace what looks like pointless martyrdom, her warrior nature is in Dane, but there’s also a lot of Judah’s saintliness and his disconnection from the world in that character. Of course Dane is less horrendously patronising that Judah and y’know, hot.

M: Oooo yes. I can see that now. Dane might well be the child Judah and Ann Hari never had, their own worse traits tempered by his own relatively easy-going nature.

J: Ok...so what else? So much to talk about!

M: I love the different creatures like the Voyaoni (sp?) but oh my god the Remade .. .DDDD:

J: The Remade are the first thing that started me thinking about the ‘Kraken’/ ‘Iron Council’ connection. Don't they remind you of a much more random version of The Tattoo's machine people? I almost feel like ‘Kraken’ is taking place in a world where the Iron Council existed back in history, in another country and parts of it bled into the worldwide culture, but I feel like I'm going to get a lot of flack for that view, because ‘Kraken’'s similarities to ‘Iron Council’ could also indicate that Mieville is just writing the same book again/exploring similar themes again, or that he's run out of ideas. Maybe I'm just being too much like a rabid fan when I think about what those similarities indicate and am excusing writerly failings...

M: Oh my god yes, Tattoo's machine people. I hadn't made that connection but you're right. I don't know. There are similarities but I think we'd need to read the other Bas-Lag novels before we could extrapolate that theory. Maybe he is in a comfort zone now, but it's hard to say without having read his earlier works. It's making me wonder about Embassytown and Railsea, though.

But I agree with you - Kraken and Iron Council could easily be part of the same world.

J: Were the remade becoming almost normal to you by the end? Like Rahul, the lizard man and Ulmek, the man who has to eat coal because his insides are made of pipes. At first I was horrified by what they'd been made into, but through the course of the book I kind of stopped seeing them as twisted people, who were hurt and deformed, because...they'd become more about the person for me, than the SF punishment. Does that make sense? Then again, at the end when Curdin dies and he talks about how the man inside him might have still been alive, going mad, how he might have been a prison, it brings back the terror of what the government has done to these people. I feel like I got both the humanisation of the people and the awful nature of what the system had done to them, so that by the end my horror at the Remade was all pointed at the institutions that made them, not at them if that makes sense.

M: Curdin is a tragic, horrific figure. As is Toro, once she takes off the helmet. Toro breaks my heart for what happened to her. You're right though - you get used to the Remade and stop being shocked and then Wham! you get a character like Curdin or Toro and you realise that there's this unspeakable horror going on all the time in the background of the novel.

J: Toro and the Mayor are one of my favourite points of Mieville’s subversive behaviour in this novel. We’re all used to genderswap narratives, where a character who has been signposted as male in some way turns out to be female, right, but...how to say this... Even though I often like that technique the genderswap is usually SO heavily signalled and that, plus the cultural build up of these narratives has made the gender switch and bait a big literary cliche. At least, I feel it’s gone from being an entertaining trope to an over-used trope; it’s rare that I see a writer pull off the switch in a way that really makes me go ‘woah, look at you and your assumptions about gender Jodie’.

M: I honestly had no idea Toro was a woman until she took off her helmet, and I wonder if that's a generational thing. I mean, my first exposure really, to a kick-ass woman on television was Xena. In the 90s. I have a lot of, let's call it gender-bias even though that's not quite the right phrase - left over from the 70s and 80s.

J: I know, I was so surprised too. I mean, this could just be a consequence of me being really aware of the trope and the spotting the clues but, personally I feel like the genderswap type of narrative should be absent of clues (even clever, subversive nods). I mean a crucial part of the purpose of disguised gender narratives is the reveal at the end and how it makes you feel, right? Genderswap endings are supposed to make you realise your unconscious ability to tumble into traps about gender. When that element is missing, the conceit becomes close to pointless. When it comes to other kinds of twisty mysteries it’s nice if the reader is given the chance to follow along and guess things if they’re paying attention, but with this particular kind of surprise I think being able to follow planted clues takes a lot of the purpose of setting up the gender switch away.

But for me, Mieville totally pulled off that surprise element. I had no idea Toro would be a woman under that helmet, no idea that the Mayor could be a woman and the fact that I had so easily gone on to assume that these characters must be male, partly because their femaleness hadn’t been commented on and ‘HEY! Male is the default Riiiiight?’ really made me sit bang up straight and assess my biases. Even though I consider myself feminist, it’s great to get that hard slap kind of a reminder, because it’s so easy to slip into unconscious biases, given the world we live in. Reminders to be politically active for the win.

M: Exactly. And for me, part of it is the generational thing but also on Mieville's part that was very, very well-played.

J: Final crammed in thoughts: I’m glad Cutter is a gay character and exists in ‘Iron Council’ because erasure is never the way forward. And I like that while there’s a little bit of uncomfortable feeling from those around him about his sexuality (which upsets him) he is very accepting of his own sexuality. And everyone around him doesn’t treat him as if he’s a leper or anything.

And I love that even though Mieville starts off with Cutter being against more feminine seeming gay men (the dollboys) which again seems pretty traditional for the whole western gay character sensibility, towards the end of the book the doll boys come back as revolutionary fighters who gain respect and affection from people. Of course, it be nice if they didn’t have to prove themselves in this way, but since they do, it’s great how everyone then takes to them and celebrates their bravery rather than falsely deriding them as cowards, just because they exhibit non-traditional gender performance.

M: Oh the dollboys' last stand. That was so amazing and heart breaking. Like it was as much their revolution as anyone's and like ... here. Let us SHOW YOU what we're capable of.

J: Anything else, or shall we let the nice blog readers go home now?:P

M: Heh. I think they can go home now. Snacks to the left, exit to the left ;)

comments

'Bait' - Alex Sanchez

Sun, 13 May 2012 16:51:46 GMT

Diego beats up a gay classmate for smiling at him, landing himself in court. His probation officer, Mr Vidas recommends that a previous history of non-violence and his excellent school record mean that Diego doesn’t require supervision from a probation officer. Despite feeling at first that meeting with Mr Vidas is pointless, Diego quickly comes to feel an important benefit from speaking to Mr Vidas and asks to be put on probation so they can continue to meet.

Soon, sensing that something isn’t quite right, Vidas tries to draw him out on his past relationship with Mac, the step father who committed suicide, using counselling techniques. Diego just wants to talk about Ariel, the girl he’s crushing on, but Vidas persists until Diego begins to reveal more about his past and the troubles that physically harm him in the present.

‘Bait’ contained many of the same writing problems that irked me when I read Sanchez’s earlier novel ‘The God Box’. The most annoying aspect of the writing is that the main character’s thoughts over explain the significance of any detail of his life that is revealed. In the first pages the reader sees Diego’s mother angrily remind him that she can’t keep taking time off from her job to deal with his problems and immediately Diego tells the reader how this makes him feel and why her absence from work is so important:

‘Feeling a little guilty, Diego stooped down and picked up the clip. He knew his mom was struggling to keep their family afloat. There hadn’t been any life insurance settlement because Mac’s death was a suicide. But even when Diego tried to help his mom with money from his Saturday job, she told him to save it for college.’

This paragraph and others, such as: ‘He wished he could change the channel and be at home, taking care of his aquarium fish or goofing around with his little brother, Eddie; or at the beach with his best friend, Kenny, hunting for shells and riding the waves…’ are crammed with too much information to produce a natural sounding narrative. Sanchez tries to quickly set up all the relationships that Diego has within these first few pages, instead of allowing them to be revealed naturally over a longer period of time.

The forced, fast nature of the way ‘Bait’ distributes information creates disconnection between the reader and the character they’re being asked to see as a real person. Diego is deliberately secretive and keeps from telling other characters in the story about events from his past, yet his thoughts spill quickly out for the reader to see. Sure, the information is relayed in third person and an omniscient narrator can realistically reveal more about a shy, secretive character than a first person narrator can. However, the use of third person narration feels somehow overly intrusive in this book probably because there’s a clumsy rush to hand everything Diego has experienced and all his current thoughts over to the reader and the pacing of these revelations feels too fast.

On a note of personal preference, the way that Diego hands over all the information that the reader needs to contextualise his life makes this novel hard for me to engage with. The reader is not required to expend any effort of their own in imagining his family situation. I like stories where I can have a little imaginative input into creating the story as I read, so this style of writing makes me feel less involved and less connected with Diego’s story.

Another aspect of problematic writing found in ‘Bait’ is the creation of secondary characters. Diego’s best friend Kenny is entirely undeveloped. He appears to have no life outside of Diego’s story and exists merely to support Diego when he needs it. Mr Vidas, Diego’s probation officer is the only secondary character who gets more fully developed. He has a life outside of his supportive role in Diego’s story, where he has a male partner, a child. He has undergone some trauma similar to things that Diego has suffered ¹. However, the development of Mr Vidas’ character does lead to an opportunity for Diego to address his own worries and it could be argued that the fact that his character is further developed, while other secondary characters are not, once again shows that this novel is only concerned with Diego and not with the wider world he exists in. In general I felt as if Sanchez wants to get all the side aspects of writing a novel, like world building and secondary character creation, out of the way, so that he can concentrate solely on fleshing out Diego’s story. That disregard for creating a detailed world, enhances the feel that like ‘The God Box’ this novel is more of a box containing some important messages for teenagers than a novel.

I know I’ve only written about negative aspects of this novel, which may lead you to believe I had a miserable time reading ‘Bait’, but this novel filled a very specific reading need for me. I wanted a novel that would be quick to read, but not insubstantial a book that centred on serious issues, but one that wouldn’t take me weeks to get through and that’s what ‘Bait’ provided. Once again, Sanchez addresses important issues and works through the logic of problems facing confused, silenced people. And despite the barriers to connection that the writing style throws up, as I mentioned above, I did care about Diego, especially once he was able to be honest about how he had been hurt. I think I now know exactly when Sanchez’s novels will fit with my reading mood and when they won’t, so if I’d like to read a little bit more by him (and I think I would because his novels allow the reader knowledgeable access to important social issues) I’ll know when to pick up another of his novels.

¹ I’m hedging here, because revealing what Diego has been through could be seen as a spoiler, since what happened in the past isn’t revealed for a while. I think it’s pretty obvious what’s happened to Diego quite early on.

Other Reviews

Dreaming in Books
Queer YA

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Political Fiction

Thu, 10 May 2012 10:41:10 GMT

I recently mentioned to litlove that I’m craving fiction which is overtly political. She gave me some fabulous recommendations and well, that just made me greedy for more. What’s the use of a blog if I can’t tap people up for suggestions?

Does anyone else know of good fiction that actively grapples with politics? I know that the personal is always political, but I’m specifically looking for fictional books or films that either incorporate some discussion of systems related to politics (protests, government, riots, elections, strikes, underground groups) or that engage in active discussion of big political subjects (gender inequality, class inequality, poverty, racial rights, the death penalty). Historical, contemporary and futuristic settings would be awesome! Films, books, tv, music, theatre can all be added to the list, as long as they’re fiction (I have a terrible attention span for non-fic). Classics are great too.

If anyone is about to suggest I read China Meiville's books, I already have him covered *insert creepy, inappropriate wink*.

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'The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska' - Colleen Mondor

Mon, 07 May 2012 17:57:09 GMT

Obviously, I like stories. I read, I write a book blog – take it as a given that stories are important to me. Like any other book Colleen Mondor’s first published book, the creative non-fiction memoir ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska’ is full of stories. She talks about pilots she worked with, when she ran dispatch operations for an Alaskan freight and transport organisation, who loaded dead bodies and sled dogs onto their planes, who chased wolves and crashed into mountains. She reports the history of pilots like Ben Eielson and Russ Merrill who flew during the early days of Alaskan aviation history. Alaskan aviation history and the extreme flying of the present, promise to be fascinating, factual subjects on their own, but the reader of ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ is doubly blessed, because Mondor has decided to wrap the substance of these tales up in a narrative style full of examination and questioning intensity, which encourages readers to critically address the very nature of story telling itself. And while I love stories for themselves, for their inter weaving of plot, characters, description and emotion and the effect that this whole package has on me, I have a special fondness for narratives that nudge me towards a better understanding of how story telling works. Any book that shows me how to take off the back and pull out the layers of the mechanism which powers stories, while continuing to grip me with the material of its own individual narratives, stands a good chance of winning my heart.

‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ is pre-occupied not just with it’s own subject matter, but with the way it will tell the stories it contains, the over arching idea readers will take away from this book and the general act of telling stories. It expresses the problems associated with story creation, even as its author casts a story onto the page. This dissection of the act of shaping stories, through narrative creation is a meta aspect of writing that will probably be familiar to fans of fantasy and lit-fiction, who have watched books like ‘The Virgin Suicides’, ‘The Penelopiad’, ‘Liar’ and many more implicitly critique the way the limitations associated with allowing someone to shape a story. Transposed onto the non-fiction narrative of Mondor’s creative memoir, this method of illuminating the reader’s need to approach any fictional narrative with a certain amount of questioning caution more overtly highlights the need for a similar approach to non-fiction; a genre often portrayed of as containing absolute truth. Throughout Mondor’s narrative readers are subtly and overtly encouraged to engage with non-fiction in an active, inquiring manner, examining it for the slants and biases that are so often present. They are urged to construct new ways of thinking about big subjects like heroism and tragic death, that defeat old, simplistic narrative structures. And all this is going on while the book fires out exciting, devastating, well crafted stories about human life under extreme circumstances. I mean…I really didn’t stand a chance against this book.

Now, how does ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ manage to contain what essentially feel like questions about writing craft and problematic narratives into a non-fiction book about flying in Alaska, without making the inclusion of these lines of examination feel clunky and forced? Well, to me it seems that narrative of flying in Alaska is shaped around those questions. The parts of her story of working dispatch at an organisation she calls the Company, which she selects and presents in this narrative, allow her to discuss particular anxieties about writing and reading the stories of others. The idea that the details of Alaskan aviation which she chooses to includes are selected to fit a structuring narrative about writing becomes evident almost from the beginning of the book. There are places, for example where Mondor includes conversations with people who know they will feature in the book, such as one former Company pilot, here called Sam Beach¹, who is concerned about what she will write:

‘Lately he is asking about what I’m writing, how I am planning to fit his story into it. He’s worried about parts of it, about late night phone calls when he thought he was losing it, about showing up at my door one day after too long in the Bush with no end in sight, about all the times I know he almost crashed.

“Don’t make me sound weak,” he says, and I have to shake my head. How could anyone who flew those kind of hours in that kind of weather ever look weak?’

By the way, every time I reread that conversation I feel it gently tapping at my heart, creating thin fault lines, prepping it for a final shattering at the end of the book.

The use of this conversation quietly illuminates the difficulties of telling the truth and writing about living people, a current hot topic related to memoir, but also an essential question that all writers of non-fiction must consider. It’s also one of the early indications that this book is as much about the way authors construct stories, as the substance of the particular stories the book will go on to tell. In my opinion its inclusion is not co-incidental, neither is the incorporation of episodes which allow the book to address other troubled areas of story creation. The Alaskan subject matter that this book contains is crafted into a shape which allows the author to discuss other, weighty ideas through the medium of Alaskan aviation. To say Alaskan aviation is a metaphor, or a cover for these big ideas feels simplistic to be and to go too far, as the book can easily be read for its surface subject matter alone and the details of Alaskan flying are never shunted aside by set piece, writerly digressions. Instead ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ is a cleverly balanced mix of crafted subject matter which allows the reader to enjoy both subject matter and subtext.

Perhaps a note on the structure of this book will help to explain what I mean. ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ generally uses an episodic structure; each short chapter relates a new story, or talks about a different aspect of flying, history or addresses a single aspect of Mondor’s personal reactions. The content contained in one chapter does not often develop, or build on the stories in the chapters that have come before it, at least not by adding more details of plot or characterisation. The same people turn up in multiple stories, but each chapter’s content is generally connected to the rest of the book by the context of the Company’s work, by the general subject of flying and by the fact that Mondor worked with people involved in the stories, rather than by a continuous, narrative strand of character examination or linear plot development². There are obvious gaps between the stories, as this book presents a curated collection not an attempt at a complete non-fiction history of a time period. A person in ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ may get their brief, but focused narrative moment of exposure, only to disappear for much of the rest of the book. Beyond building up a picture of flying in Alaska, each new story generally contributes a more thematic development, which allows the book to discuss its big ideas about storytelling and our response to tragic, deaths which take place in epic circumstances. In the choice of structure and narrative emphasis, we see crafted creation working to exhibit both subject matter (people, events) and through that subject matter wider themes (the problems of creating heroic narratives, the limits of truth and knowledge).

So, while obviously using the selective element of the writing craft which makes it possible for human beings to read any kind of narrative (instead of staring helplessly at an empirical timeline of all the information available on a subject) and presenting a very personal viewpoint on the way the Company runs, ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ seems to attempt to eliminate the often fatal simplicity and incompleteness of the single story solution. The book uses craft tools that I recognise from fiction, but which are probably often found in non-fiction as well, like including multiple narrative viewpoints to questions the way we tell stories to others, or to ourselves; to try and make the reader aware of the problems that can come from our (natural and often wonderful) tendency to respond to information, or a lack of information by snipping what we know up until it falls into one understandable, tidy narrative; to encourage the reader to question the notion of one, representative truth.

In a chapter titled ‘What Happened to Bryce Donovan’ for example, Mondor’s pilot colleagues discuss a crash that killed Mondor’s friend and colleague. The crash is a mystery and no one knows what really caused it, but the pilots propose multiple scenarios in an attempt to explain what happened. As each pilot puts forward their interpretation, the reader is reminded that there is always more than one way to construct a story when the reality of a situation is unknown. Each pilot, from Scott who says that while ‘trying to save the aircraft, he forgot how to save himself’ to Sam who suggests Bryce missed the real problem in his plane, because he was focused on what he thought the problem was, reveals a different slant of story telling. Each slant suggests a new way of viewing Bryce, alluding to the idea that story telling is less about absolute truth (no matter what the newspapers might try to convince you) and more about the human need to craft stories, in order to make sense of events. By being shown multiple versions of a story side by side in this chapter, readers are given the chance to realise that often multiple stories are equally possible, or impossible, that sometimes truth is unknowable and that a single story can be just one interpretation of a situation we can never fully understand. And by providing multiple interpretations, in this chapter Mondor gets closer to presenting a full, ‘truthful’ picture of her friend’s mysterious crash than she ever could by including just one possible explanation.

The use of this particular technique advances what I think ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ advances as perhaps the most relevant concern about the way stories of Alaskan aviation are told; the troubling preference people show for simplified, heroic narratives. In exploring this phenomenon, this book talks about dead pilots, such as Ben Eielson, who have been constructed as legends by writers and whose stories have been reshaped by people’s longing for a complete explanation that jives with their personal feelings about tragic deaths in epic conditions. To me, ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ appears to be, in part, an attempt to react against this typical story construction; a story construction which will perhaps feel familiar to those who know a bit about the different stories surrounding early explorers, like Robert Scott who died at the South Pole, in the most epic of circumstances. Even if you don’t know much about that area of history, you probably know the kind of narratives I mean; stories which create a rather forced convergence between the tragic and the heroic, which can end up obscuring genuine mistakes or human frailties. To some people Scot will always be a tragic hero, partly because his death took place in such epic conditions and any suggestion that he was perhaps not that well prepared is edited out of the way they tell the story. So often, single stories are created that turn real people into tidy, tragic heroes and it seems to me that this book tries to kick against that hero creation, by using various techniques to tell its story of epic, Alaskan flying, like multiple versions of a story and set piece dialogues which illustrate the problems of making heroic stories. These techniques, as well as the sustained analysis of past heroic stories, which the novel sometimes compares with episodes that happened to pilots who Mondor knew, contribute to a greater understanding of how story telling collides with Alaskan flying and attempts to subsume… not exactly the truth, but the diversity of experience and the rough edges of pilot’s aviation stories.

‘Map of My Dead Pilots’ aims to avoid perpetuating extremes like the heroic/tragic storyline, or the stupid scapegoat approach (a type of story telling which culpable organisations sometimes encourage) when it talks about the circumstances of individual pilots. Instead it seeks to present people as human beings, who are understandably familiar contradictions; full of strength and frailty; who are both professionally attentive and desperately inattentive at other crucial times. It does this again by trying to avoid single story lines and instead pulling out all the different aspects of a story, for example in a chapter called ‘Onto the Ice’ the book talks about a pilot called Ray Marrs who leaves his job after a desperate crash landing. He is shown to be a well liked man and a good pilot, but also a man who won’t admit his mistake even when it becomes obvious and a man who ran his luck unnecessarily. This kind of multi-layered approach to the depiction of real people doesn’t sound revolutionary, but it still feels if not totally new, then different from a more mainstream approach to writing non-fiction.

There’s so much else we could talk about in terms of the way this book addresses the problems of creating narratives, by making use of writing techniques and just blunt out stating what the novel wants the reader to understand, for example when Mondor writes that ‘It’s always about the story they want to hear.’ and pow, the reader is down, clutching their heart. I hope I’ve convinced you to explore this book for yourself, but let me end by giving it one more shot and tell you about what, for me, was one of the most powerful parts of this novel³. It comes quite close towards the end, when Mondor talks about Sam leaving the Company. At the beginning of this book when the reader meets Sam they learn that:

‘Sam Beach went to Alaska seeking redemption, reflection, a rehearsal fro the rest of his life. He told his family it was only for a year, maybe two and he believed it when he said it. He believed everything about Alaska: the books, the magazines, the endless supply of cable TV shows.

Especially the TV shows.

He fell hard for the myths, even though he pretended not to.’

By the end of the book Sam is aged by his experiences at the Company, where pilots fly with broken equipment and have to go out in weather that has been officially classified unsafe. He goes back to his parent’s house and tries to deal with where he has been, but a huge barrier to his personal recover is that no one understands what he’s seen and no one wants to hear the unedited truth. The book has previously shown that funny stories pass muster with outsiders, the worst are shrugged off as dramatic exaggerations and sometimes people don’t connecting with the right details that allow the pilots to tell the stories they need to tell. Sam’s father asks if his son has ever been scared flying and Sam answered ‘strong and sure’, no, but the chapter goes on to explain to the reader just why he answers no, ‘You cannot have your sudden moment of clarity then…You needed it when it could have saved you, not now, when there is only silence and gravity and prayer.’. At the end of that explanation, the book notes that ‘Sam doesn’t realise his hands have started shaking, that the beer is spilling slowly, gently onto the concrete floor.’ His father quietly covers his hands.

Later, when Mondor visits Sam, they sit telling stories, forgetting that his parents have never heard these stories before. Slowly, Mondor notices that he parents are silently freaking out:

‘Quietly, so quietly, there in front of us they started to fall apart. The truth hurts sometimes, you know, when you finally painfully, realize that what you’re getting you can’t deny. Sam’s parents smiled graciously as we sat and talked, but they were breaking as we told our stories; like the thinnest wine glasses in a sink full of plates, they just broke.’

Both of these stories are overwhelming because of the simplicity they use to evoke emotion. Bring tissues if you cry easily, because I don’t and I teared up as I typed those quotes out. This portrait of Sam, speaks of a man wrecked by outside forces, who the reader desperately tries to imagine a later life for and kind of...can, as long as they imagine it encompassing those shaking hands around a beer, support, troubles, lapses, happy moments, reminisces and the unfortunate necessity of crafting stories for an audience.

In the end ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ can’t avoid being a narrative which shapes the way its reader responds to certain events. It’s a book at the end of the day and it has to be readable, so it has to contain a created narrative. Its style and structure is heavily informed by the techniques of narrative craft and I guess its overall construction mirrors the idea of working for political change by making use of the political system. Even as it critiques and subverts the shaping of narratives, it still makes use of narrative shaping. Finally, it is written from a personal perspective and while it reads as an even handed account to me, it unavoidably (and thankfully) contains a passionate, mildly persuasive slant when talking about the Company, as it projects Mondor’s personal feelings after working for them. There’s an emotional layer in the stories she tells about people who based on colleagues she really knew, which can’t help but potentially direct reader feeling.

I don’t point this out to indicate that ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ is doomed to fail in its endeavour to provide an alternative narrative form; I merely comment on the limitations imposed by text and storytelling as a whole. Most importantly, while working within the constrictions/constructions of narrative ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ reminds us to constantly remember the need to question narratives, to examine the slant of a story and to pay careful attention to our own tendency towards story telling, even our personal ways of curating, or obliterating stories we don’t want to hear. ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’ was never an argument against stories; Mondor’s blog makes it obvious how much she also likes stories. Instead it is an eloquent prompt to be aware of narrative shaping, to fight against traditional narratives if they serve us poorly and to expand the act of story telling. It is so exciting to see a non-fiction book make clear the reasonable anxieties we should all have about created narratives which aim to represent people and push real life into a story form. After, seeing these ideas set out with great elegance and explored with an affectionate use of tools from the very craft that the book critiques I hope that there will be another book from Mondor very soon.

Full disclosure: I’ve been reading Colleen’s blog ‘Chasing Ray’ for about five years and occasionally we talk on Twitter, but I bought my copy of ‘The Map of My Dead Pilots’.

¹ The introductory note says the names of real people have been changed, with a few exceptions.

² There are exceptions to this general trend, for example Sam Beach reappears throughout the narrative and the ‘plot’ of his life is developed in a linear fashion, but even in his case the parts of his narrative line are distanced from each other and do not show his complete life story.

³Although it creates an abrupt transition in the book, as the narrative changes to focus intimately on just one person.

Other Reviews

A Chair, a Fireplace and a Tea Cozy

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'The Tiger's Wife' - Tea Obreht

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:26:54 GMT

Please excuse me while I gush. OMG, ‘The Tiger’s Wife’! The story in this novel is told so naturally and simply, that there are no barriers between the reader and the character’s humanity. At the same time its structure is intricate and there’s plenty of meandering, interconnected content to satisfy anyone looking for a read to wallow in and later, lovingly dissect. Although it purely presents an overarching theme, more than it analyses that theme, this novel is so lovely and just good, good stuff that I can’t wait to see what Tea Obreht is going to do next. Let me try to explain why this novel got me so excited.

This is another novel like Sarah Waters, ‘The Night Watch’ and Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’ that prompts me to rave about its exciting use of structure. ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ makes uses of a story within a story structure. The first storyline we’re introduced to is the story of Natalia a young doctor, who is crossing a border in the Balkans to deliver medical help to an orphanage (and I should probably note here that my knowledge of the geography of this area and the history of the conflicts the book talks about is miniscule, so expect vagueness). On the way to the border crossing with her best friend and colleague Zora, Natalia learns that her grandfather has died, not at home as she expected but in a small town that Natalia has never heard of before. She decides not to tell Zora about her grandfather’s death and continues on to the orphanage. Natalia’s story is established as a present storyline. While this story is interesting and contains a separate importance of its own, also functions as a framing device which allows Natalia to tell stories from the past; both the past story of her relationship with her grandfather and the two stories that shaped her grandfather’s life:

‘Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told me, is of how he became a child again.’

Here Natalia explains that she learnt about the two stories in different ways. She says that the first story she learned on her own, but the second (a story about a man who could not die) was told to her by her grandfather and the novel carefully presents that story with its own distinct, developed framing device, which makes both the substance of that story and the way the story is told feel important to the reader. This second framing device is presumably included to make the reality of her grandfather and their relationship more present and believable to the reader, so that they will empathise with both characters more and to facilitate a more natural telling of her grandfather’s story.

So, the reader is asked to depart from directly relating to present Natalia at various points in the novel, as she becomes a narrator of the past recounting various parts of the relationship between her young self and her grandfather when she was growing up in the City, a place often disrupted by war. Each time the reader meets past Natalia and her grandfather, a new piece of the tale about the deathless man is revealed (there are three, longish sections, each containing a new instance where her grandfather meets a man named Gavran Gaile). Although the inclusion of Natalia’s grandfather’s in the novel serves a purpose (to allow the novel to tell two extra-ordinary fantasy like tales) her grandfather is not a puppet storyteller kept eagerly waiting around to tell the next piece of his story. Each piece of the story is first preceded by present Natalia’s reminiscences about Natalia’s young life and her relationship with her grandfather. He emerges from these tales as a character in his own right with a history and a life. He only reveals each new piece of the story about the deathless man after his interactions with Natalia prompt him to continue the tale and this story, although about the deathless man, is also deeply about Natalia’s grandfather.

Just a quick note on how the structure is building: these sections about the deathless man also add another layer of structural complexity to the novel, as they are told in the first person by her grandfather. So, now we have present Natalia who was telling us the story of her trip over the border, but then deviated to tell a new story about past Natalia and her grandfather. Then her grandfather, one of the people in that story began a story of his own in his own voice, adding layers of immediacy to a narrative from the past. The structure pulls us through wonderland door after door and then abruptly returns us to beginning of the cycle of narratives, to add new layers of understanding and detail to the reader’s experience.

The first story mentioned in that quote, the one about how her grandfather ‘became a man’ and the story about the tiger’s wife of the title, comes to Natalia after her grandfather is dead. The narrative subtly suggests that Natalia took a journey to the village where he lived as a boy, by having her describe the trip the reader must take to reach the village in almost a detached, purely descriptive way that sounds rather like an omniscient narrator:

‘Twenty minutes in, the road hairpins, and when you take this turn, wait for the blaze that strikes across the valley, where the pin forest stands dense and silent: that light is the sun glancing off the last surviving window of the monastery of Sveti Danilo, the only sign that it is still there, and it is considered a miracle, because you will see it from the same place any time of the day, as long as the sun is up.’

However, Natalia is never positioned quite as an omniscient narrator. She knows a lot of things that others don’t, as her grandfather has told her his secrets, but there are still things she doesn’t and can’t know, so this passage may seem a bit lacking in narrative logic at first. Then near the end of this description she mentions ‘a white-haired man sitting on the porch, and the moment he sees your car, he will get up and move indoors’ While this could also be a sign of an omniscient narrator, who sees this journey being taken by others throughout history, it suddenly seemed more likely to me that this time specific detail (the man can’t live forever) was the product of experience and other details also sound like events the story teller had wrestled with in the flesh:

‘The sign will not tell you that, once you have turned onto the path, you have effectively committed to spending the night; that your car probably will not make it back up in on try; that you will spend eight hours with your knees against your chin, your back against the door, your flashlight pointless and unused in the trunk, because to retrieve it you would have to get out of the car, and that will never happen.’

The story of the tiger’s wife is revisited throughout the novel. More detail is filled in and the plot moves forward. And occasionally there is a reference to how the butcher’s daughter will be able to fill in a detail or two. Again these could indicate the knowledge of an omniscient narrator device, but I personally construe it as a sign that Natalia makes the journey and talks to people about what happened so many years ago.

Right, ok then, by the end of the novel readers have read a story, within a story, within a story and a bonus story as well. It’s an ambitious undertaking. Are there snags? Well, yes. As Natalia’s stories are devices that facilitate her grandfather’s stories to come out Natalia sometimes takes on the unfortunate cast of a storyteller, or a narrator who exists entirely to disseminate other people’s experiences. Her own present day story about crossing a border and treating sick children is rather shunted aside by her strenuous efforts to understand her grandfather’s tale of the deathless man. Her quest to understand causes her to abandon her own journey at times. Eventually and inevitably her own life bears marks of conveniently tying up with her grandfather’s experiences, becoming merely a continuation of his story rather than an examination of her life.

Thankfully Obreht’s novel saves Natalia’s story from the ignoble fate of becoming a convenient co-incidence. And although Natalia’s life story and the tale of her time at the orphanage are undeniably the way that Oberht makes it more natural for her grandfather’s stories to emerge her personality is just as developed as her grandfathers is, with all the detail and obsceneness that such a comparison implies. Her stories lack the magical element of his stories, but they are no less interesting, personal and detailed. The gaps in her early life story sometimes left me wanting more detail about what she had been doing around the particular episodes that are brought into focus for the reader, how she felt about people consigned to the background of this novel and as a consequence seemed at times, to create a messier, vaguer picture of her life than the tidy, narrative of her grandfather did. On reflection though we learn about the same level of explicit detail about both characters’ history and the gaps in what we learn about Natalia and her grandfather are similar, for example we learn very little about Natalia, or her grandfather’s feelings for her grandmother and his daughter. By the end of the novel Natalia is both a device and a person, although her grandfather undeniably gets more page time as there are three narrative strands that relate to him (the stories Natalia tells about spending time with him, the story of the deathless man and the story of the tiger’s wife).

I’m a fantasy fan, so it’s not exactly surprising that I was charmed by the folk like stories of the tiger’s wife and the deathless man. They’re beautifully developed, with just the right amount of magic, realism and history inter-woven to create tales you can believe in and care about. I really think any attempt to describe them is going to miss so much of the detail that it’s not really worthwhile, as these tales (especially the story of the tiger’s wife) are full of their own mini-character stories, which build a level of detail and emotion which would need to be picked apart in their own studies, so I’m going to cop out and say READ THE BOOK. I would be so interested though if anyone wanted to discuss these details of two stories in the comments, especially the relationship between the disability of the tiger’s wife and the almost romantic mysticism of her portrayal. Also, I'm kind of dying for a discussion about her character in relation to litlove’s idea that magical realism is designed to give oppressed people a voice.

One aspect of the fantastical side of this novel that I really liked was the space provided for readers and the characters in the story, to question whether they’re seeing something supernatural, or if there are innocent explanations for the events. The novel never really forces the reader to abandon their fondness for the fantastical, nor does it force that magical interpretation on to readers who might want a more real world explanation of what happened. While the story of the tiger’s wife is ultimately a cautionary one against the harm that superstition and prejudice can bring to a small village, it’s also a story where tigers really do brush by small boys without mauling them. I find the supernatural side of the story of the deathless man hard to argue with, but Obhert introduces a real explanation of another mora that brings into question the reality of spirits. What I like so much is that you are allowed to come to your own conclusions with just a little prompting from the book, without being made to feel silly, or cynical for choosing one side, or another.

And this is Obreht’s debut. How will her writing develop in the many years of writing still available to her? I can’t wait to find out.

Other Reviews

Eve’s Alexandria
cardigangirlverity

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Projects are Fun!

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 11:31:17 GMT

The big thing I’ve discovered this year of blogging is that I love taking part in readalongs and watchalongs with just one or two people. I’ve been involved in a couple of wider group readalongs this year, am looking forward to being able to take part in Amy’s film group soon and I really like spending time with the ‘Slaves of Golconda’ group when I have time. Still, what I like doing the absolute best is spending time with one, or two people as we indulge in the same media together. It’s nice to hang out with people in a really direct way. To everyone who I have already collared into a joint project, I am having such a good time with you all *beams*. Thanks for agreeing to chat with me like this.

This leads me to a question. If you’re not already involved in a readalong/watchalong with me, would you like to do one sometime this year? I’ve been such a disconnected blogger so far this year, so maybe no one will want to, but if you’re still reading it would be nice to get to know people who visit this site a bit more.

So...if you’d like to watch, or read, or even listen to something with me then please drop me a message in the comments and include some way for me to get in touch with you. We can discuss ‘terms’ (what piece of media you fancy sharing and when, whether we’ll end up making a post about it, or whether you’d just prefer to chat) over e-mail.

*Presses post button nervously*

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'Page from a Tennessee Journal' - Francine Thomas Howard

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 06:14:15 GMT

Annalaura Welles lives above the animals in a barn, sharing one room with her four small children. Her husband John, was a sharecropper; a person hired to work an area of farm land for the owner of an estate in return for a lump sum of cash, dependant on the size and quality of the crop raised, so the whole family live on the McNaughton estate. Last season John raised an outstanding crop, but now John has disappeared, apparently abandoning the family just before the second season’s planting period. He has stolen Annalaura’s money and taken much of the family’s small food store. Annalaura is desperate to hide the fact that John is gone because if Alexander McNaughton, the owner of the estate, finds out there is no man to pull the crop in he will evict her family from the tenancy. As a black women without a husband, she will also become ‘fair game’ for any white man around (this is 1913, after slavery has been abolished but a long way from any kind of legal equality for black Americans). So, Annalaura struggles to project the idea that John is still around, while covertly dealing with the consequences of his departure and theft.

‘Page from a Tennessee Journal’ is written in the third person and relates the separate perspectives of four main characters. The reader is immediately sucked into Annalaura’s desperate attempt to survive in the first chapter, then the narrative follows McNaughton and his wife in the second chapter, before shifting focus again to concentrate on Annalaura’s husband John. The reader learns that he has gone to the city in the hopes of earning enough money to buy his own parcel of land, so that he won’t have to work for a white man any more. At this time, southern, white estate owners blatantly rob their black tenants, under the cover of providing them with essential materials for living and working ‘on tick’. It is understood that the cost of items such as seed to grow the crop and food to eat while they wait for the crop to grow, will come out of the tenants earnings when the crop is sold. By levying this ‘advance’ white estate owners make sure that black tenants never earn enough to invest in their futures and break from a cycle of what is essentially indentured labour. John Welles is an exceptional tenant, who pulled a tobacco crop that made ‘...three thousand dollars, more than twice any other tenant farmer he ever had...’ from an uninspiring mid-forty acreage but after one season working for McNaughton, he understands that he will never earn enough money from share cropping to forge an independent future . So, he robs his wife and leaves his small children to work the land during the crucial planting and harvesting period.

That might seem a harsh judgement. I mean, John Welles has noble aims right? He’s fighting his own battle against oppression. And of course, John himself doesn’t frame leaving his family, quite as I have when he thinks about his actions. John sees leaving his wife behind as a noble endeavour; he will get a city job counting cards at a high rolling establishment in order to put his children through school and return the hero. That is a worthwhile aim and many readers will surely find themselves conflicted as the man (who in Annalaura’s section is described as a reckless, restless, deserting dreamer) is humanised. It is important to note that even though his actions cause his wife serious problems, he is in his turn screwed by an unfair, prejudiced society. Intersectional analysis of history = complicated.

However, the novel is careful to never disregard the first inevitable reading of John’s actions as callous. I feel that it actively endorses the idea that John is both right and wrong by returning to focus on Annalaura’s struggles. Though John’s dreams are portrayed sympathetically in the novel, the way he goes about putting his plan into action is not. I’ve already mentioned that he steals food that Annalaura needs, in order to make his trip. While he is away from his family he takes up with other women. The sacrifices he makes are rarely sacrifices that impact on him, although he has convinced himself that he is as pained by circumstances as Annalaura must be, for example he stays in the city longer than necessary for his own pleasure, which leaves Annalaura open to serious harm but when called on this behaviour he implies that circumstances keep him from his wife and he is suffering by missing his children. If his employer hadn’t physically kept some of his wages back for Annalaura there is every possibility that he’d have kept spending in order to justify why he needed to spend even longer away from home. Meanwhile Annalaura faces starvation and is raped by Alexander McNaughton repeatedly.

Many of these thoughtless actions that readers may find hard to forgive stem from the historical context John exists in, for example he rationalises taking money from the family by claiming sole ownership of it as the man of the house and invoking his grand plans for freeing his family from white control. He also refuses to acknowledge the inevitable realities for a young woman with four children left with little food and no way to earn money, because society tells him that no matter what a woman should always remain faithful. Rape is not a concept he seems to understand in the same way that we would. Howard tries to present John as a balanced character, who has good parts to his character, but is heavily influenced by his times. However, I sometimes felt that the book had perhaps set John Welles up as too unlikeable a character for readers to sympathise with, despite the fact that he has been placed in a tough position by society. Without playing oppression Olympics I’ve got to say it’s hard to feel so sorry for a man whose dreams and aspirations are being denied him by the society he lives in, when he’s a cheating, stealing bastard who does not react as modern readers may hope on coming home to find his wife has been raped, even when we’re aware of how historical context affects his actions.

I feel the same way about how the book portrays Alexander McNaughton, the man who repeatedly rapes Annalaura. Alexander is shown as a man of his time period, claiming the free, black woman that everyone else around him said was his right, but he also has genuine feelings for his child who died and eventually comes to feel he is in love with Annalaura. Again, the bad guys aren’t always one dimensional villains. Alexander McNaughton believes he has a right to Annalaura, because his society reinforced that idea through everyday behaviour and rhetoric, much as John Welles was convinced by society’s rhetoric that it was fine for a married man to sleep around as long as he always came home, but unforgivable for a woman not to ‘fight’ if commanded to sleep with a white man. There are probably tons of things our future generations are going to boggle at that we all find totally acceptable because of our modern rhetorical structures, so we have to try not to judge historical characters in a way that positions our generation as the unquestionable pinnacle of enlightenment.

Still, the wife beating (Welles) and rape (McNaughton) perpetrated by these two men are terrible things, we know that the victims of these actions have been hurt, even if the person doing these things is surrounded by cultural reasoning that allows us to understand they were ordinary human beings rather than exceptional monsters. So, personally I needed to be given more of a reason to empathise with the male characters, in order to circumvent my impulse to judge them as bad people with everything taken on balance. I didn’t get enough sympathetic content, or perhaps the novel didn’t convey the sympathetic content that it did put across quite strongly enough. Either way I found my sympathy and interest in viewing the two men as human beings with their own problems disappeared as the novel progressed. By the end I thought they were both totally off the rails awful and although towards the end of the book both men show positive human qualities (John sets out to kill Alexander, then gives up this quest to keep his children safe from the inevitable lynching that would follow, while Alexander helps Annalaura through a difficult birth when she’s all alone) these events just weren’t enough to counter balance all the time I’d spent watching them be terrible, terrible people towards the female characters. For whatever reason I firmly aligned myself with the women against the men, instead of finding a way to sympathise with everyone. I’m still not ruling out the idea that personal feeling has influenced my reading of a couple of characters who other readers will be able to both sympathise with and hate just a bit, but I have read books that successfully convinced me to feel sympathy and dislike before now, for example ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ contains a character who is abusive, but also seemed separately sympathetic to me.

What I feel the book does really well is to show exactly how hard life could be for women involved with these particular kind of men, by introducing the reader to these two complicated, but ultimately violent male characters, which neither of the two sympathetic female characters can trust. Annalaura is a woman trapped between a rock and a hard place in this book. And McNaughton’s wife Eula Mae lives in a loveless, predictable marriage, which she tolerates by deceiving herself, until her husband begins to fall in love with Annalaura (although, of course he doesn’t fall in love with her, just an idealised version of her that he calls Laura). Both women are given active point of view sections in this book, which allows the reader to really get to know them and understand their lives. I would have liked a lot more from Annalaura after Alexander McNaughton begins to rape her, because I wanted to see her feelings about their relationship revealed. Clearly by the end of the book the time they spend together has become more than rape, but how did she reach that state of mind? I thought that the reader had much more access to Eula Mae’s troubled internal feelings. Hearing her inner thoughts humanised and developing the dull, obedient woman Alexander sees, into a person only the reader knows. Not that Annalaura isn’t taken past the image the men in her life have of her in the sections the reader gets access to their inner thoughts, it’s just that as the character the book begins with and the woman who seems to be the heart of the book, I might have expected the book to give even more space to her perspective.

To finish, just a (longish) note on the book’s writing. I started ‘Page from a Tennessee Journal’ a while ago and was put off by the immediate clunky exposition of the first paragraph:

‘Annalaura Welles stirred out of her fitful sleep to the certainty of two things. Husband John was gone for good this time, and even with the help of her four young children, she would be unable to bring in the tobacco harvest by the end of August. Though this was coming up the second year she’d sharecropped the McNaughton mid-forty, she still wasn’t used to living in the converted upper reaches of a barn.’

Sure, this paragraph serves a purpose. It gets a lot of necessary information across quickly: who the protagonist is (Annalaura Welles); what her circumstances are (a woman with four children living above a barn); information about her past (troubled marriage with a man who has left before and now seems to have left permanently) and what the major conflict in her life is (the inability to harvest enough tobacco). It introduces points of interest, which is supposed to intrigue the reader into wanting to continue with the story, for example the reader might wonder who are the McNaughton’s and where has John Welles gone.

Unfortunately there is a lot of information contained in this three sentence paragraph, which is a relatively cramped portion of writing space considering all the facts and information the reader is supposed to absorb. The paragraph is overburdened with more background context than it is capable of encompassing comfortably. The reader’s rhythm is disrupted by the author’s decision to overstuff this first paragraph with straight forward info dumps and attempts to naturally link two rather dramatic declarations with a sentence about living in a barn. This paragraph has the effect of making the novel sound like it is blurting out information, hurling it at the reader rather desperately, with no regard for elegance, as if the narrative thinks it needs to hand the reader all the information they could possibly need or they will leave. The effect of reading it is kind of like when you meet a stranger on the bus who tells you their whole life story in a loud voice, without pausing for breath. Book, you are making me uncomfortable!

I know how important the first sentence can be to help readers decide whether they’re going to pick up a book and continue reading it, so if this passage sounds as shouty and desperate to you as it did to me, can I just say please, please persevere. The rest of the writing is not like this at all. There are a couple of other awkward moments of exposition, but nothing on the scale of other books I’ve reviewed here before (naming no names, but you probably know which ones I’m talking about). For the most part ‘Page from a Tennessee Journal’ is written in an easy to read, solid and inviting style. It’s a good piece of storytelling and I’ve spent so long going on about my problems with the first paragraph so I can explain that the rest of the book is written with much greater naturalness, because I don’t want people to be put off and miss out on this historical novel.

Of course I could just have kept my mouth shut and only talked about all the bits I liked in the novel instead.

And wow, I just called the book ‘good’, which sounds kind of a pathetic word in this world of ‘awesome’ and ‘fantabulousness’. We should rehabilitate the word good…

Shut up brain, over thinking does not help! : P

So, overall a good historical novel, that makes me want to start reading more historical fiction again, because the world within was conjured so well. It’s a book that erases some of the disappointing experiences I’ve had with historical fiction recently, which have irrationally kept me from returning to the genre. And yet, still, not a book that encouraged me to feel sympathetic towards less than sympathetic characters. Zetta Elliot and the author, Francine Thomas Howard discuss John Welles in an interview at Amazon, but I’m curious to know, how does everyone else feel about the men in this book?

Other Reviews

BookLust
Brown Girl Speaks
rhapsody in books

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Readathon 2012

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 10:47:50 GMT

Can you believe it’s Dewey’s annual 24 hour readathon today? For some reason, I had no idea until justaddbooks mentioned it this week, but I have a free (and probably very rainy) weekend so I’m going to take the opportunity to join in.

My plans? Well, I never go all out hardcore for readathon, so I won’t be reading for the whole 24 hours. And I really want to make the most of my reading time this year, so I’ll be keeping myself offline for a good portion the time. I’m going for short books this year and among my pile of choices are Helen Dunmore’s latest novel ‘The Great Coat’, ‘The Sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes and ‘The Thief’ by Meghan Whalen Turner. I’d also like to read a bit more of ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’, which I’m discussing with litlove as we make our way through.

I’ll be cheering during hour 11, or 12 to keep up the spirits of anyone who’s around. For now, have fun and a successful readathon *salutes*.

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Guys Lit Wire Book Fair 2012

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:33:50 GMT

It’s time again for the Guys Lit Wire book fair. Each year the blog team behind Guys Lit Wire find a school, or a project for young readers, that may need a little financial assistance procuring books and creates an online wish list of books that the organisation would love to be able to give to the young people they work with. Anyone on the web (who can afford to participate in these hard times) can buy specific books off the wish list and send these donations directly to the project.

This year the team are sticking with Ballou High School, as they build their library’s book collection up from scratch, with incredibly limited funds. Guys Lit Wire started working with Ballou last year when they saw a video Ballou’s librarian Melissa Jackson had made about the low number of books available at Ballou. Thanks to the efforts of everyone involved in the first two book fairs Guys Lit Wire ran, Ballou now has two books for each student (there are 1,200 students in total), which is fantastic, but as the American Library Association recommends that there should be a minimum of eleven books per student in a school library there’s plenty more work to do. If you can help then please check out the full instructions for donating at the Guys Lit Wire launch post.

I wanted to talk about why I think the methodology behind the book fair makes it an especially good project to support:

1.) Both the librarians and the students at the school work with the Guys Lit Wire team to select the books that go on the wish list. The importance of involving the people a project actually impacts, in the creation and development of that project is widely recognised, as these people tend to know what is actually needed and their input allows a project to be more effective. I think it’s especially great that the students at the school are empowered to shape the library they’ll be using and have been given the opportunity to ask for types of books that adults might not automatically choose, like manga novels and contemporary teen series.

2.) People can purchase used and sale copies, to make sure that this project allows many people to contribute in what are difficult financial times. Buyers are further encouraged to check that the used copies are listed as ‘standard’, not ‘student owned’. This guidance is put in place to ensure that Ballou isn’t receiving tatty copies which will fall apart after a few reads. As Ballou has limited funds to procure replacement copies when books become unreadable, encouraging the purchase of better quality copies allows the library to be more sustainable. And again, the idea of giving books that the student will enjoy reading is key to this project. Clean used copies are often more appealing than underlined, dog earred student copies (and who doesn’t love the thrill of opening a completly new book?).

3.) The wish list is run through Powells, which I understand is the largest independent bookstore in the US. So, not only are you helping to build a library with any purchases you make, you’re also supporting an independent bookstore.

4.) You can watch the library being built before our very eyes, by checking the wish list and spotting the book requests that have been fulfilled at the Powell’s website. I find that watching that list get bought up is literally like watching the world change for the better. From a personal, maybe selfish donor point of view, at a time when I’m experiencing the kind of recurring frustration with “the way the world works” the Ballou project is a huge symbol of hope.

Hope is important.

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'My Mortal Enemy' - Willa Carther

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 11:25:18 GMT

Willa Cartha’s ‘My Mortal Enemy’ is split into two parts. In the first the narrator, Nellie, recalls being introduced to Myra Henshawe, a rebellious, exciting character from the history of Nellie’s hometown Parthia, Illinois. Myra broke with her rich father when she was young and left her wealth behind to marry Oswald Henshawe. Nellie’s aunt Lydia was Myra’s close friend, a guest at her illicit wedding and makes sure that Nellie meets Myra and Oswald when the couple briefly return to Illinois.

Myra is the kind of character who naturally fascinates a fifteen year old ingénue from the country, like Nellie. When they first meet Myra is dressed in velvet, with amethysts at her neck and she radiates a commanding poise, but also a charming lightness. I got the feeling that she wins people’s admiration by fashioning herself into a shape that is deliberately calculated to impress, holding her chin just so and standing still when Nellie enters so that her young visitor must go to meet her. Nellie is quite flustered by her ‘formality’ and verbal prodding, yet she also finds herself desperate for the older woman’s approval. She is dazzled by Myra, but sure she doesn’t have a hope of winning her favour, but instead of despising her for their difference (which seems to one common reaction in literature to feeling inferior to another woman) Nellie very much wants Myra to like her.

Unfortunately, although Nellie likes Myra she can never be quite sure ‘whether she was making fun of me or the thing we were talking about’ and feels that ‘Her sarcasm was so fine, at the point—it was like being touched by a metal so cold one doesn’t know whether one is burned or chilled’. She also describes Myra’s special, hard edged laugh, which is held back for addressing foolishness:

‘ “How good it is,” my mother exclaimed, “to hear Myra laugh again!”

Yes it was good. It was sometimes terrible, too, as I was to find out later. She had an angry laugh for instance, that I still shiver to remember. Any stupidity made Myra laugh for instance, that I still shiver to remember. Any stupidity made Myra laugh—I was destined to hear that one often! Untoward circumstances, accidents, even disasters, provoked her mirth. And it was always mirth, not hysteria; there was a spark of zest and wild humour in it.’

Myra is the kind of woman that many want to befriend, because she gives off an impressive, confident feeling that makes those around her aspire to be worthy of love from such a fabulous, thrilling person. Of course, when friendship is based on the desire of one person to be made worthy by another’s love the desperate fear of rejection is always present in that relationship. Myra appears well aware of the fact that she is free to criticise others and appears to enjoy inspiring the fear of disapproval in those she meets. People want her good opinion, partly because her bad feeling is so hard to endure and partly I suspect, because it is better to be laughed at by Myra than to be part of the dull set away from Myra (the book does not explore this idea, I’m just extrapolating subconscious feelings based on other books I’ve read about fascinating, well dressed women who have a rather harsh streak – literary scholars would strike me down for this I’m sure).

There's no denying though that an enduring and heartfelt attitude to friendship sits alongside this nettling aspect of her nature. When Nellie describes the special way that Myra says her friend’s names her words conveys the feeling that Myra is devoted to the people she cares about:

‘When she but mentioned the name of some one whom she admired, one got an instant impression that the person must be wonderful, her voice invested the name with a sort of grace. When she liked people she always called them by name a great many times in talking to them, and she enunciated the name, no matter how commonplace, in a penetrating way, without hurrying over it or slurring it;…’

If more evidence of Myra’s loving nature is needed then the first time Nellie sees Myra and Oswald together she observes that they seem genuinely interested in each other’s current state, even though they have been apart for perhaps an hour, in fact she notes that they seem to have an unusual amount of active affection for each other, compared with other long married couples. When Nellie and her aunt go to visit the Henshawes in New York for Christmas Myra sends a large Christmas bush to an actress friend who will be spending the season alone, which seems like a generous offering (although Oswald manages to hint that there may be less altruistic motives behind this gift). All of these details suggest that while Myra may partially rule her circle through fear and inequality, she can react with genuine, spontaneous love towards the people she likes.

The novella skilfully plays directs the reader to both like and dislike Myra, just as Nellie constantly changes her opinion of the central character. This direction is not just intended to show Myra as a human character, both flawed and wonderful, but to set up a very clever trick at the end of the novel that revolves around the hidden truth at the heart of the Henshawe’s marriage. So, many episodes which produced a conflicted feeling about Myra and Oswald’s relationship, as well as conflicting portraits of Myra, are included, for example while Nellie and Lydia are visiting at Christmas Oswald asks Lydia to present him with a pair of topaz cufflinks as a Christmas gift. They are from a young woman who admires him, he says and although their friendship is perfectly innocent Myra won’t let them in the house, unless they appear to come from someone more respectable. Lydia agrees, but it is clear to the reader (although perhaps not to Nellie as narrator) that Myra has spotted the trick right away, as she makes an incredible fuss over how lovely the cufflinks are, practically forcing her husband to wear them out, while he is seems suddenly unhappy and unwilling to have them.

This episode can be read as a re-enforcement of the idea that Myra rather controls her husband and that she prefers manipulative laughter and underhanded slights, to more straight forward talk. Perhaps, the reader is led to think, it is Myra’s fault that Oswald strays, or at least keeps gifts from young women, because she is so petty and poisons their marriage by refusing to fly into a rage, or react normally. Perhaps she is too hard on him and people in general. These thoughts may be supported by other evidence for this idea that appeared earlier in the novel, such as the way that Nellie first describes her, the story of her leaving her father and an incident when Nellie first met the couple where Myra exercised extreme control over her husband’s choice of clothes. When Nellie arrives at their apartment one day to find them arguing over a key: Myra assuring him she will go through any door she likes; Oswald with what seems like a rational explanation, she feels sorry for the man and thinks she will never like Myra so well again. As she and Aunt Lydia leave for home Myra throws a last barb at her dear friend, which provokes Lydia to exclaim that ‘ “A man never is justified, but if ever a man was…” '. Perhaps, the reader may think, Lydia is right.

Still, the novel makes it clear that all may not be as simple as it seems. In the second part of the novella Nellie meets the Henshawes again. Ten years have passed and Nellie has moved into a wretched apartment hotel and is looking for work. The Henshawes also have an apartment in the building. They have fallen into financial difficulties and Myra is incapacitated by illness. Oswald cares for his wife and Nellie finds no fault in his behaviour, in fact she still feels sorry for him because Myra appears to treat him worse and worse as her illness progresses. Eventually, in a fit of openness and wandering provoked by the illness she seems to pronounce him her ‘mortal enemy’.

Although Nellie re-interprets this line and comes to believe that Myra is speaking of herself, a woman undone by her own jealousy, pride and controlling nature, there are signs that Oswald may not be as easy to vindicate as Nellie thinks. He takes pleasure in speaking with a young woman, although everything about their relationship seems innocent to Nellie. Myra appears to grow more afraid of him as the days go on, although Nellie attributes this to the illness. Perhaps most significantly Oswald still openly wears his topaz cufflinks, the ones given to him by a young admirer. And when that detail is revealed easily and without apparent concern by Nellie, it is hard for the reader not to think back on the small details that reveal Oswald as a more complicated man than the sweet, saintly carer Nellie sees now. Suddenly, I was reminded of the man who flashes his wife a look containing ‘amusement, incredulity and bitterness’ when she gives away his new shirts.

The final question for the reader, once Myra succumbs to her illness, is whether Myra was at fault in this marriage, or was she a woman trapped by a husband who forced her into bitter and petty reactions? Was Oswald really hiding a Sir Percival Glyde personality, underneath a clever facade? Or is there something even more complicated at the heart of their marriage, something to do with Nellie’s feeling that Oswald’s life ‘had not suited him; that he possessed some kind of courage and force which slept, which in another world might have asserted themselves brilliantly.’ while Myra is clearly such a strong personality, but perhaps one confined to too small sphere. Are there people who should never marry for fear of drowning each other out and bringing out the worst qualities in their partners? When Nellie finally separates from Oswald after Myra’s death, she takes the necklace of amethysts that Myra wore when they first met, but she can never wear them, ‘they are unlucky’ and when she wears them she hears ‘that strange complaint…: “Why must I die alone like this, alone with my mortal enemy!” '. By the end of the novel I think Nellie is unsure who that line refers to and so was I.

‘My Mortal Enemy’ tells a simple story although, but often it’s the simplicity of the way a book lays out a situation, the precise nature of its descriptions and the fluent, uncluttered nature of the way a story is told that makes it strike the heart, rather like Myra’s laugh of ‘cold metal’. Thanks to the Slaves of Golconda and litlove for providing me with an opportunity to read it (litlove actually sent me a photocopy of her own book so I could take part in the readalong). I know there are a lot of themes under the surface of this story that I haven’t dipped into and I’m so looking forward to hearing what everyone else has to say.

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An Art Full Return (terrible puns for the win)

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:04:23 GMT

The other day I had a spare few hours in London, so I dropped into the National Portrait Gallery. I specifically wanted to see the Imagined Lives exhibition, a group of portraits with subjects that have yet to be correctly identified, because Meghan told me it was interesting. They also had some of the newly released photographs from Scott’s Terra Nova expedition on display and I am a polar enthusiast, so that sealed the NPG as my destination for the day.

I’ve been to the gallery before, but if you’ve set foot in that building you’ll know it’s not an attraction you can see all of in a day and it is incredibly addictive. Both displays that I’d come to see were on a floor I’d never visited before so I got kind of caught up in trawling this floor for faces I knew something about. I lingered in the Science and Technology gallery, where there are pictures and busts of Darwin (Darwin in everywhere on that floor), Lister, Harvey, Stephenson etc. I wandered through some special cabinet exhibitions about Dickens and learned a bit about an artistic group I’d never heard of called The Souls. It turns out Edward Burne Jones (whose stained glass is monumentally cool) was involved with them. I also saw a Branwell painting of the Bronte sisters, which was particularly awful. He may have been the ‘secret genius’ but he was not a painter it seems.

Unsurprisingly there are a lot of famous men on display in the portrait gallery, but I also saw pictures of Mary Seacole, Emmeline Pankhurst and two sketches of proto-feminists Josephine Butler (shown in the picture below) and Harriet Martineau, which for some reason were randomly in the Science and Technology gallery. They campaigned against the poor treatment of women with sexual transmitted diseases, that’s sort of sciency I suppose.

And then on the way out I went and gazed in wonder at the free part of the Lucian Freud exhibition. His etchings are just absurdly absorbing. How do any of the staff in the gallery get their work done while those are on display? It’s so easy to get lost in his lines.

It often feels like everything interesting happens in London, so it’s nice when something I want to see turns up closer to home. The week before my trip to the NPG I went to see a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition in Birmingham. I understand that The Royal Collection holds many Da Vinci sketches and a large exhibition has been opened up in London to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee. A small selection of sketches have been released to tour the country. I’ve never actually seen a queue at Birmingham art gallery before (although I hear the Staffordshire Hoard prompted queues out the doors when it first opened), so it was a bit of a shock to have to queue through two galleries. Of course that meant there was lots of time to look at the huge Edward Burne Jones drawings in another gallery.

I’m very much of the ‘don’t know much, but I know what I like’ type of art appreciator, so you won’t get any technical talk about Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings from me, but I did like them. That sounds so silly, I mean, it’s Da Vinci! Anyway, there were sketches of inventive weapons he’d designed, which reminded the fantasy fan in me of the Terry Pratchett novel (is it Jingo?) where the captured inventor first appears. He has all these fabulous ideas for abstract inventions and is horrified when Vetrinari outlines the way these inventions could be used in war. There were also a couple of sketches for a Da Vinci painting that has been lost. The fact that the sketches still exist is so cool, as it allows you to almost see right into a part of the past that can never be recovered.

My absolute favourite sketches though were his drawings of the anatomy of the hand and foot. The pages are covered in his notes and the lines of the drawings are so fine and the detail is intricate. That really brought home to me the fact that Da Vinci had sat over this piece of paper, touched it and left his mark on it. History girl hot flush.

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Ladies Get Things Done

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:34:04 GMT

It’s International Women’s Day, the perfect day to signal boost a data analysis project about gender and reviews on SF/F blogs that renay has been busy building for the last five months. She posted ‘Coverage of Women on SF/F Blogs’ which contains her findings and a whole heap of questions that allow for further exploration.

I’m so very proud of her for getting this project to its conclusion.

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'Goliath' - Scott Westerfeld

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:52:12 GMT

Scott Westerfeld’s steam punk trilogy featuring Alek, the future heir to the Hapsburg throne and Deryn, a brave, cross dressing airship officer, comes to its end in ‘Goliath’. I feel bad for writing a review of ‘Goliath’ that isn’t as positive as my reviews of ‘Leviathan’ and ‘Behemoth’. Those two books provided so many fun reading times and I feel like I’m doing the whole trilogy down somehow, as it wraps up, by not heaping love on ‘Goliath’. I still think the world that Westerfeld has created is ingenious and bursting with invention, but I just didn’t enjoy the plot and pacing of ‘Goliath’ and it didn’t quite provide the outstanding ending that fitted with the technical sharpness of the earlier books in the trilogy.

In my review of ‘Behemoth’ I said that Westerfeld had created a clever second novel and pulled off the magic trick of creating a mid-trilogy novel which places the over arching plot of the trilogy in near complete stasis, but is so full of life that the reader is barely conscious of the novel’s desire to delay the main action until book three. ‘Goliath’ also has a specific function that it must perform as the final book in this trilogy: it must send its characters on to their final physical destiny and propel them towards the conclusion of their story. Although, it contains the necessary dynamic narrative to move its characters and events forward to that ending, its narrative drive is hampered by several battles, which slow the novel down. It was hard for me not to compare the two novels when ‘Behemoth’ is a crisp, compact story without a superfluous plot point in its entire 542 pages and makes such a success of working with the limitations imposed by its place in the structure of this trilogy, while ‘Goliath’ almost seems to fight against being the most effective version of itself.

Don’t get me wrong, Westerfeld writes a good battle. He has plenty of opportunities to prove that writing a clear, exciting battle, or adventure scene is one of his top five skills, because the characters are required to travel extensively in this novel to set up the finale of this series and that travel has to more interesting than ‘and then Deryn and Alek went to Russia to pick up Nikola Tesla’. ‘Goliath’ is packed full of adventures and these episodes are thrilling, especially when the airship encounters the famous Russian fighting bears. Unfortunately, plot points like Alek and Deryn’s encounter with Japanese fighting forces, sometimes feel rather disconnected from the novel’s main goal of advancing the main plot. The characters move on rather quickly and these battles feel like they have no consequences, even though logically we know that after Deryn and Alek leave, these events must play out to a wider conclusion.

Despite the fact that I think some of Deryn and Alek’s off plot excursions make the novel feel bloated, these trips are interesting as individual episodes. Ale and Deryn witness a battle involving Britain’s Japanese allies and end up spend time with Sancho Panza, as he gathers troops for a revolution. And not every world expanding, action piece lacks relevance to the wider plot, for example Deryn’s cross dressing disguise is revealed to a character, when she is treated for a wound at Sancho Panza’s camp, where privacy is hard to come by and that has ramifications for her personal storyline. I liked the range of detail that was provided about Westerfeld’s steam punk universe by these parts of the novel and the fact that the book took readers outside of the Western European focus that is so often present in books based on World War One. I just think too much of this detail and world expansion is unnaturally crammed into this final book. Maybe a fourth book would have allowed more space for this exploration and a focused, sharp final book. I can’t see into parallel universes, so who knows?

‘Goliath’ is undoubtedly full of Westerfeld’s usual steam punk inventiveness and around the rather stuffed content, there are a lot of fun, sci-fi details (a two headed imperial messenger eagle, Russian fighting bears and the Kappa) in ‘Goliath’. Bovril, the perspicacious lorix and Dr Barlow’s lorix are both back and they’re chatty. There is even some cool stuff centred on the electrical inventions of Nikola Tesla, which may appeal to people who know their science history better than me. I don’t want to accidentally make it sound like I’m warning people away from the whole trilogy just because the final book felt a little hinky to me, because the imagination that this novel shows off is kind of glorious, even occasionally it feels like every last steam punk idea possible has to be shoved in before Westerfeld has to abandon this world.

As you might have gathered from my reviews of ‘Leviathan’ and ‘Behemoth’ I have been SO worried about how Westerfeld would bring Deryn and Alek together. I’m happy to say I was so satisfied with the way this romantic storyline concluded, that I had no problem leaving Deryn and Alek in each other’s arms at the end of this novel. I thought of some minor quibbles, for example it seemed that as soon as Alec found out Deryn was a girl, he realised she was in love with him. I mean he was right, but it felt almost like a foregone conclusion, that friendship must really indicate love if you’re a girl, who has disguising her gender and formed a deep friendship with a boy. However, I thought the ending was just perfect for Deryn (unsurprisingly, I was most worried about how a straight, romantic conclusion would affect the girl disguised as a male midshipman). Even though Deryn realises she has to give up her job flying the Leviathan, she avoids being shoved back into the skirts that she dreads and maintains her cover as a boy, because Professor Barlow is able to offer her a job at London Zoo (where the real shit gets done). Alec never challenges her right to keep up her disguise and seems happy to keep their romantic relationship going, despite the fact that they can’t go public until Deryn gives up her disguise ¹. Love. This. Ending.

This final novel in the Leviathan series is fun and works hard to transform the reader’s understanding of this particular conflict and of war in general. The novel departs from the cast, characterisation, setting and ‘moral judgement’ of typical WWI stories on many occasions. Lilith, who is a bisexual, female revolutionary fighter, briefly reappears. Alek is once again shown as a pacifist and regrets killing, which is radical for a male member of a royal family. Deryn, our female, cross dressing, military hero, keeps her trousers. This is some new, exciting WWI stuff, is what I’m saying. If I had a criticism of how ‘Goliath’ wraps up all the exciting, newness this trilogy brought to the world it would be that I was a little disappointed that the ethics of the different technologies weren’t explored in quite the depth I’d expected, before the trilogy concluded. Alek and Deryn live in a world where animals are used as air ships and mechanical technology is clearly mostly used by the opposition, even though the novels have striven to complicate that position. Despite all the rollicking fun and running around, ‘Goliath’ did occasionally leave me feeling that I needed more depth to be able to leave this world satisfied.

Even though ‘Goliath’ wasn’t quite what I was hoping for in the final volume of the ‘Leviathan’ trilogy, I feel a little sad to have reached the end of Deryn and Alek’s story. In her review of ‘Goliath’, Ana from The Booksmugglers (who kindly sent me her spare advanced reader copy) says:

‘On its own, Goliath may not be as good as its predecessors but it is a satisfactory conclusion to what is overall, an absolutely recommended, awesome series. I know I am going to miss waiting anxiously year after year for an instalment, I am going to miss this crazy-cool world and above all I will miss the characters, especially my girl Deryn who is a barking incredible heroine.’

I don’t think I can improve on that closing statement. Good luck Deryn, we’ll miss you.

¹ I’m making an assumption here. Westerfeld hasn’t included anything that explicitly makes me think his sci-fi world contains, or does not contain homophobia, so I’m basing my understanding of whether two people who look like boys could openly be together, on the real WWI time period.

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Quiet

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:18:57 GMT

The beginning of the year is always a bit of a funny time for me. First there’s an avalanche of birthdays, then as the dark descends early every evening and takes an age to leave in the morning a little bit of the January blues creeps up. The shortest month follows the loooongest moooonth poooooossible, so suddenly I’m in the third month of the year and never quite sure what I’ve done with the first two, the months when resolutions are supposed to be acted on. I’d like to suggest that in 2013 the year starts in March, the point where the year finally stabilizes and I start leaving the house regularly, instead of lying down in front of the tv most nights.

I think at 27 it’s time to admit I am officially a bit useless until March and that’s probably not going to change. I’m reading lots of books right now and I’m watching tv, but I’m not generating very many reviews or thoughtful posts. All the posts that are going up right now were written at the end of last year and have taken ages to edit into shape (brrr, brain is cold, needs Vampire Diaries at night, not computer screens). That’s just the way things are right now. Today, light was appearing while I got dressed, so maybe I’ll be more into writing full reviews soon. Otherwise there are a few pre-written YA posts that will be appearing, but nothing about what I've read this year, or at the end of last year I'm afraid.

I’m really excited about lots of the things I’ve been watching and reading though, so do you fancy a bit of my random, quick chat about them? There’s a big tv post coming soon about the tv I watched over Christmas (which I wrote over the Christmas holiday), but right now though I’m sunk deeply into ‘The Vampire Diaries’ (Series Two – four episodes left), in that delicious way that box sets make possible. DVD box sets are one of my favourite things, even if they are a total luxury item; you can watch a whole series in one big gulp and stay situated in the story until you’re ready to stop, the way you can when you’re reading, or watching films. Blissful tv control.

I still watch tv ‘live’ though. I just finished watching ‘Borgen’ (Series One) ‘live’ on BBC4, which is thick, plot heavy, satisfying stuff (and bombarded Ana with thoughts). And I like being able to watch ‘Call the Midwife’ every Sunday night. It’s perfect back to work tv. ‘The Hustle’ is the other thing I’m watching every episode of at the moment and aww it is so cute, comforting and full of smart tricks that I really don’t want this to be its last series.

On books: I’ve been so good about sticking to the rule I made at the beginning of the year (I think I just made it in my head, in case I failed, so this may be the first time you hear about it) to only buy one new book a month and read from the books already in the house. I’m making shelf space! I’m also sticking to my resolution not to ‘save’ books I’m excited about. I started the year by reading ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ (really enjoyed it, written by just my kind of spy fiction author – one with an interest in people) and have just finished ‘The Tiger’s Wife’, which was simple and natural. It was completely different from what I was expecting and I think fantasy lovers, who like folk tales will enjoy this lit fic, award winner. Last month I used my book buying slot to buy ‘Tankborn’, which was a bit of an up and down read for me. Still, it was a piece of sci-fi by a woman, so my year has begun with me sticking to my intention to try and read more sci-fi by ladies.

There will be reviews of those later (when my brain has woken up) and I owe an SoG post about ‘The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. For now imagine me happily reading, or watching, curled up under a blanket in the spare hours after work. It may not be an ambitious way to spend my time, but it’s comfortable.

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Happy Dickens Day

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:28:08 GMT

As today is the official celebration of Charles Dickens' centenary I wanted to talk about the parts of the BBC’s Dickens season that I watched in December 2011. However, I feel bad that posting about this so late means anyone who wants to watch the programs will have missed the opportunity to catch up with many of these programs on iPlayer.
How does everyone feel about posts on tv that isn’t available to everyone anymore? And how do those of you who can’t use the iPlayer service, because of country restrictions, feel about posts on BBC programs? Do you want me to continue to talk about tv, even if it isn’t easy for everyone to access, or would you rather I kept that chat off my blog after this post, because it makes you frustrated?

On to the Dickens Day content:

‘Great Expectations’: Oh I luuuurrrrved this. I luuurved it. So Dickens sexy, if you know what I mean – lush, gothically weird and with a few dark, homo-erotic moments sprinkled over the storyline from the book. Gillian Anderson was excellent as the younger than normal Miss Havisham. She fully got across the fact that Miss Havisham is only so evil because she’s been horrendously damaged by a con-man, but that her relationship with Estella is still creepy and dangerous for the young girl. I also <3 Ray Winston’s performance as the seedy, but honourable Magwitch.

This is the kind of gothic styled production that I enjoy watching so much. There was a great perverse artistry in the costuming and in some of the horrible acts shown, like Magwitch’s leg chains being soldered while still on his ankles. There’s a slicing wonder for the viewer to extract from the twisted nature of the human emotions being shown. There can be something horrendously attractive about watching people being cruel in a particularly clever or artful manner, especially when they’re costumed to the eyes in creepy/pretty clothes.

Still the viewer is never encouraged to enter this piece as a close up voyeur of ‘deliciously’ styled pain, cut off from all the mundane reality of being hurt. Instead, they’re shown the full range of ways in which pain affects people and the way that it can be presented with polished, visual impact. Is there the potential for an intersection between horror and beauty when the viewer watches Estella hold herself haughty and hateful, in watching Miss Havisham go up in flames, or even in watching Magwitch’s final death in this production? Sure. Is the viewer encouraged to focus solely on the beauty at the expense of the reality of painful emotions? Nuuh. Pip and every other character’s emotions are always clearly on display, so that the viewer can’t help but see them as real people who don’t deserve the hurt they’re experiencing, even as the costuming seduces the senses.

Three back to back parts was just the right pacing for this adaptation. I am (harshly) going to compare the new Great Expectations film to this adaptation, when it comes out this year.

Highlight: Umm EVERYTHING, but especially the friendship between Pip and Herbert Pocket, as well as the scene where Herbert teaches Pip to dance.

‘Mrs Dickens Christmas’: If, like me, you knew nothing much about Catherine Dickens, then this was a very informative program about her life and why the Dickens’ marriage fell apart. I know the BBC is supposed to be known for its balance, but I was still amazed that this program was shown in the middle of the celebrations for Dickens centenary, because it is so (rightly) critical of Dickens behaviour towards Catherine. Sue Perkins was a fabulous presenter for this project, as she captured the irritation any feminist viewer must have felt as they learned that a man so revered for being a literary genius, potentially used his novels to openly mock his wife. His wife, who, just by the way, had ten children before he dumped her for a younger woman.

Lots of fascinating stuff about the role of the Victorian woman was included to provide context for Catherine and Charles’ relationship. The whole thing was topped off by Perkins’ extended dramatic readings from parts of Dickens’ novels, which illustrated the points being made. And of course that made me want to read more Dickens (but not Oliver Twist, no matter how much exciting Nancy and Bill stuff is read out I’m not going to be tricked into reading that again).

Highlight: Learning all the odd pet names Dickens called his kids by and finding out that Lucifer Box was one of them. Mark Gatiss you require me to be so knowledgeable to get all your jokes!

‘Armando Iannucci on Dickens’: Iannuci’s program was much more of a Dickens tribute (he quickly mentioned marriage difficulties, without dwelling too much on the fact that Dickens was the driving force behind the split). Iannucci spent much of his time talking about passages from ‘David Copperfield’, I suppose because it’s always called the most biographical of his novels, which made it easier for me to understand what he was getting at as that’s one of the novels I’ve actually read (and I enjoyed it).

Iannucci also goes off to find out what various people like about Dickens, which I enjoyed and people had very smart things to say. I’m still not convinced that Dickens is that funny, despite the attempts of three comedians, to make him sound hilarious. He can raise a laugh with word play, created some outright laughable characters and used funny names, but his wit isn’t very penetrating. I still find myself having to remember that the techniques he uses are funny, rather than smirking spontaneously. Still, this program was passionate and made me want to pick up a new Dickens novel soon.

Highlight: Seeing all of Dickens work arranged in one pile and feeling excited that there’s so much for me to look forward to.

‘Edwin Drood’ : ( I know he was a terrible person who killed his father, but I still felt really sorry for John Jasper at the end of this program. Edwin Drood was a total pill and I almost wished he had been murdered, despite his fabulous hair.

I’ve never read the book, which is Dickens’ last and unfinished novel, so I read the wikipedia article to see how the television adaptation matched up to the original plot. I’m pretty sure that I liked this adaptation better than I’d have liked any ending by Dickens, even though John Jasper did still have to die. There was a lot of room for the viewer to see him as a tragic hero and feel empathy for him, which he deserved, having been rejected by his father for the blond, blue eyed Edwin.

Random note: Can anyone who has read the novel tell me, are the Landless characters mixed race in Dickens original, or was that a decision taken by the creative team working on this adaptation? If it was their decision it was a fantastic one (no death and some romance for Helena at the end).

Highlight: Bazzard the helpful clerk is super funny, with his distaste for the hellish indoors and his desire to be an amateur sleuth.

If anyone fancies a night of Dickens this year, to commemorate his great work (if not his approach to his personal life - really, he was a terrible man) I recommend getting your hands on the the recent BBC min-series of ‘Little Dorrit’, or their version of ‘Oliver Twist’ (that story is so messed up, but I will watch every adaptation of it ever and look Tom Hardy and Sophie Okenedo are Bill and Nancy in this version). ITV also made had a great go at producing ‘Oliver’ (look, it’s the lovely Marc Warren doing weird, *gazes*). Or you could fall back on a solid favourite, ‘The Muppet’s Christmas Carol’ – not just for kids, look Michael Caine is in it and everything.

If you think I should be watching a particular Dickens adaptation this year, please share in the comments.

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'Great House' - Nicola Krauss

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:16:07 GMT

Don’t you hate it when a book is good, very good indeed, but you don’t dig it? ‘Great House’ by Nicola Krauss is a well written narrative that unravels many deep thoughts and contains a structure of some interest....but I didn’t like it. Prepare for possibly unfair justifications.

The structure of ‘Great House’ is technically interesting, compared to the more popular linear, single narrative. The book is made of two large sections. Within the first section there are four individual chapters: ‘All Rise’, ‘True Kindness’, ‘Swimming Holes’ and ‘The Lies Told by Children’. Each of these chapters introduces a new character’s story, but there are several similarities between the individual stories. Each of the individual chapters focuses on a person who holds themselves separate from an important person in their life. Each story is told using first person narrative, although sometimes the story is told from the perspective of the person who is disconnected from those around them and sometimes it is told for the perspective of the partner, or family member who they are detached from. Three of the sections mention the presence of a desk, which contributes a menacing presence to the atmosphere.

In the second section the titles of each of the chapters above are repeated in a slightly different order and each narrator’s tale continues under the appropriate heading (barring ‘Lies Told by Children’, which is replaced by ‘Weissz’ and gives a voice to a background character from ‘Lies Told By Children’). In this section real life connections are made between the four narratives, as characters from one section begin to show up in the stories of other characters. So, the subject of ‘Great House’ is personal disconnection, but connections exist between several of its separate narratives. Perhaps it is a novel of disconnection that never the less reminds us all how connected we are, no matter how we try to severe the links of human relations.

If the emotional resonance of such a small, but sustaining thread of hope exists in this book I could not grab on to it. I’ll admit that the kind of person that I am (intensely private) makes it hard to read ‘Great House’ without feeling as if it is kicking off about the way I live my life. The thesis of ‘Great House’ is that private people destroy lives. Many of the characters in ‘Great House’ retain what seems like ridiculous levels of privacy in order to remain capable of feeding a personal obsession and their behaviour often tips over into cruelty as it silences those around them. It’s hard not to feel challenged by ‘Great House’ being as attached to privacy as I am, especially when so many of Krauss’ characters are extremely punished for their behaviour.

After a deal of analysis, it’s clear that many of Krauss’ most negative characters have no direct relation to my own life. A character like Weissz, the obsessive, repressive antiques dealer determined to keep his grown children under his rule, has changed from being merely a private person to an obsessive who deliberately destroys personal connections between his children and their peers. Krauss also advances characters like Dov in ‘True Kindness’ who has become removed from those around him, but is less of a negative character (if no less sad for his inability to connect with his family, or lovers). Surprisingly this novel written by a stranger is not all about me and I don’t have to dislike it because it aims its criticism at me.

Instead I’m forced to admit to a cardinal sin amongst book readers. Part of why I didn’t like ‘Great House’ was because it was graphically, openly bleak in its depiction of human relationships. Wait, dudes and dudettes I am not getting on the ‘bring back the sunshine’ brigade’s badly soldered festival float. Lemme esplain myself.

I take no issue with any authors’ right to be bleak. The world is tough, things don’t always work out and relationships between people can turn nasty. While I am very much of the ‘little glimpse of hope would be nice’ persuasion, because I try my best to believe humanity’s goodness, if a book portrays the awful really well I am open to being persuaded that life is BAD. However, I do have a problem with the belief that all badness deserves equal punishment, that there are no extenuating circumstances for why people behave terribly.

Nadia, is a writer who works on her writing by herself all day, yet clearly shows her irritation when her partner finally returns for the day. Her irritation forces him into a home coming routine where he slowly allows her to come to terms with his return, which she sees as positive until the day he leaves her and learns how the need for that routine makes him feel:

‘I’d hardly stopped to think how S might have felt, for example, when he walked through the door of our home and found his wife silent, with back turned and shoulder hunched so as to defend her little kingdom, how he felt as he removed his shoes, checked the mail, dropped the foreign coins into their little canisters, wondering just how cold my mood would be when at last he tried to approach me across the rickety bridge.’

Once he explains, Nadia realises that she has failed to see him as a person, or to consider anyone else but herself as real in her quest to create. The truth of this realisation is backed up by the reader’s knowledge of other relationships that she has plundered for the sake of her work, without considering the feelings of others. Krauss has set up obsession with an occupation and the purposeful disconnection that can come from focusing so much on a task as the source of all evil in this particular novel. It is clear that the reader is supposed to be brought round to agree with this idea, as more and more horrendous actions are perpetrated by characters that separate themselves from full human companionship. These characters discard empathy and exact rigorous, stifling control on those around them.

Nadia’s storyline shows something about the walls that private people can create unnecessarily around themselves and the disregard for others this kind of attitude can foster. It reminds me of things that I need to work on myself and gives great insight into the ethics of the creative process. Although by the end of the book I didn’t like Nadia and I feel really sketchy about the implications of her inclusion in this story alongside so many other childless, creative female characters who come to no good (I’ll come to that later), I did feel satisfied with her storyline. I felt like she went through an appropriate level of pain for her behaviour, but that I could still find a way to empathise with her. I felt like she was capable of learning and change by the end of her story.

The terrible endings of Lotte and many other character’s stories can be seen as a punishment, or a corrective, a way for Krauss to demonstrate that not only does this type of behaviour endanger a person’s relationship with others and harm other people, but it brings bad things upon the perpetrators head. Again, ‘Great House’ is explaining something about the world to its reader, possibly in the hope that it will enlarge their understanding. However, to fully embrace Krauss’ ideas readers needs to agree with Krauss’ ideas of what constitutes estrangement, obsession and appropriate punishment when reading ‘Great House’. And while, as I said I found the punishment of Nadia appropriate, I felt saddened by the demise of Lotte and even by the death of Weissz. Both their obsessions stem from a place of serious pain. While I can see Weissz’s end is as justified as a fictional death can ever be, because his pain has caused him to mentally harm his children, Lotte’s pain has led her to push her child into the arms of someone better equipped to take care of him. Yet, it’s hard not to see her loss of memory and self, as a punishment for this action, an action which I found unbearably sad rather than the actions of a selfish person who can’t share her life with anyone. I grieved for Lotte and perhaps I was supposed to, but it didn’t feel like I was as the only has access to her is through her husband’s removed view point, which is ultimately full of judgement. There’s no room for any hope, or any real understanding when it comes to the reader’s interaction with Lotte and I find it hard to take, this blanket judgement and destruction of all people who aren’t capable of forming relationships.

I admit that the bleakness of ‘Great House’ is powerful. Krauss creates a world of moral ambiguity, where no one is right and although most of the characters perpetrate horrible crimes on each other, some are worse than others. This feeling of watching two devils fighting each other, so that the reader can judge who is the least evil is beautifully encapsulated in ‘Weissz’.

Perhaps at this point I should mention that three of the main characters who reject relationships with families and partners in favour of creative work are women. Two are childless women (Lotte and Nadia), one (Leah) is rather too young to be labelled childless, but the fact that she will never marry or have children is commented on by her father. Yep, that’s something we’ve all seen before right, the idea that creative, working women are uncaring, obsessed and usually too tied up in their work to have time for children.

Every unfeeling female character is childless, closed off from their lover and creative and ‘Great House’ seems determined to link its female character’s lack of feeling with these circumstances. In ‘Great House’ childlessness feels like a consequence of failings in these women’s emotions. If only characters like Nadia, Lotte and Leah had a child, the book seems to say, they could open up, defeat their lack of empathy and form normal relationships. And the implicit logic that if only they were less closed off they’d want a child seems to bring up the idea that only unnatural women don’t want children. The divide between the female characters who are emotionally isolated and don’t have children and characters like the nameless American woman who goes on to have a child and form a happy marriage unfortunately reinforces common negative stereotypes about women (childless women are hard, cold and uncaring, unlike mothers – creative women avoid having children). It’s a vicious circle of logic, that doesn’t allow for the possibility that women who don’t want children aren’t all closed down emotional wrecks.

You would never know that from reading ‘Great House’, as it is exclusively focused on the importance of the disconnection that can be found in romantic and parental relationships. This focus excludes the idea that a woman who is ‘bad’ at or incapable of having those kinds of relationships may find valuable ways to connect elsewhere. Not one female character in the book seems to have any serious friends, yet this missing class of relationship is not accorded the same importance as family, or romantic relationships. To me that feels like a bit of a flaw in a novel, which is trying to show how separation from human relationships can have negative consequences. I also wonder why, in a book that features so many creative women the idea of connection with an audience is never really explored. That’s another valid way of forming connections that is ignored.

I’m not levelling charges of sexism at Krauss’ novel, because there are also three male main characters that are so full of work that they can’t let anyone near them. Maybe the reader is even asked to question the relationship between childless women and estrangement issues, as two of these men have children, one does not and all do a bang up job of fucking everything up emotionally. I think an unfortunate, casual link has been made between gender, creativity and coldness as the central point of the novel (human beings are irreparably damaged, usually somehow through their parents and this leads them to damage themselves and others) is developed. Healthy, happy, lasting relationships of any kind (except apparently background relationships between the male characters and shady, dead wife characters of the past and one friendship which seems to exist purely to provide Nadia with support, would detract from this theme. It’s just unfortunate that while developing this idea ‘Great House’ reinforces traditional negative stereotypes about creative and childless women.

Like I said, ‘Great House’ is impressive and very good. The digressionary wending that each narrator deals in as they work their way through their section is detailed and interesting. It is insightful about the negative flip side of dedication to work. Many places in the novel felt true and painful. Oh and it contains the outline of a sci-fi story, that is being written by one of the characters, which I’d love to see as a novel.

I just didn’t enjoy it at all. Sorry. Maybe ‘Memory of Love’ will be more my kind of thing.

Other Reviews

dovegreyreader
Bookslut
Iris on Books

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'Behemoth' - Scott Westerfeld

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:40:19 GMT

‘Behemoth’ is getting love everywhere and I’m not about to spoil the party. All the things I enjoyed in ‘Leviathan’ were present in this second steam punk novel by Scott Westerfeld and I also discovered a few things more things to squee over.

Here are a few of my favourite things about ‘Behemoth’ (probably full of spoilers).

The inventiveness and originality of the technology

‘Behemoth’ takes place in Istanbul, part of The Ottoman Empire, which uses Clanker machines in the shape of Darwinist creatures. This combination of Clanker technology with Darwinist design makes it unique and makes it an ideal, powerful ally for both sides during the current war. After the first book I assumed that Istanbul’s choice to comine Clanker and Darwinist elements would make it an ideal vision of society that Deryn (Darwinist) and Alek (Clanker) are supposed to work towards. It quite quickly turns out that this is not so; although Istanbul’s sultan is interested in Darwinist technology, he’s heavily allied with and probably controlled by, German Clanker forces. The aesthetic presentation of Darwinist technology appears in Istanbul’s elephantine walkers. However, when Dr Barlow, the ship’s ‘lady boffin’, tries to create stronger links between Darwinist Britain and Istanbul, by offering the sultan one of her mysterious eggs, a mechanical hand is used to crush it. This shows that Istanbul is currently much more of a Clanker city. Istanbul offers the promise of the further invention which could come from the co-operation between Darwinist and Clanker technology in a society, but sadly despotic control puts a stop to that radical development.

Even if Darwinist sensibilities haven’t gained a real hold in Istanbul, it’s so much fun to see the the creature shaped walkers and watch them be incorporated into Deryn’s adventures. There’s so much other fun technology to enjoyas well, for example gliders, a bed that walks, walkers in the shape of Gods and Goddesses, and a deadly electricity canon. My favourite new piece of technology that appears in ‘Behemoth’ was the underwater suit Deryn gets to wear, which has a mouthpiece made from synthesised squid.

The action sequences

The first battle sequence takes place aboard one of the mechanised elephantine walkers, which provides a battlefield that allows Deryn to make resourceful use of a trunk and huge ears as original, interesting weapons. Battles that involve metal elephants, which can’t be horribly injured, are just fun!

Sometimes, in action adventure books, it feels like the author feels like they have to porovide the reader with a certain quota of fighting, because, well that’s what the action adventure genre often seems to be all about, especially military novels that fit this description. In ‘Behemoth’ each battle feels like it exists for a reason. It reveals a little bit more about the plot, or maybe adds detail to the world building, for example the first battle sequence lets the reader know that someone is attempting to sabotage the Darwinist cause in Istanbul. I like battles to have an added narrative purpose, besides pushing more peril and action into a story, because I think (random writing theory time) if an author is focused on an extra reason that requires them to include a battle then they might avoid over burdening the novel with static, set-piece action which will stop the overall plot from moving forward at a decent pace.

The compact, clear writing style

I’d almost describe Westerfeld’s style in these books as business like, but that makes it sound much too cold and devoid of detail, so here’s a quote so you can judge it for yourself:

‘Alek realized that a huge shadow was moving beneath him, steam huffing from its joints into the cool night air. One of the great claws was reaching out…

He fell, dropping into the giant metal hand. The impact knocked the breath from him, sending pain shooting through his sore ribs. He skidded for a moment, the buttons of his tunic snapping against steel, but the claw closed in a huge bowl around him.’

He gives the reader all the information they need to picture exactly what is happening, but only gives information that helps to advance the plot, the readers understanding of the main characters, or their understanding of the novel’s world. He doesn’t take trips away from the main point to describe the many fun, but diversionary prospects that writing a steam punk novel must provide. Now I’m a big fan of writers who do spend time going off to explore world building tangents (Pratchett) but I think expanding on a point without clogging up the narrative pace is a hard skill to master, so I also appreciate a clear follow through in my sci-fi.

The illustrations

Here are some links to the wonderful illustrations, courtesy of
Scott Westerfeld’s blog and io9.

Keith Thompson’s illustrations for this series are crowded with detail, which reminds me vaguely of things like Durer’s woodcuts (love) and the original wrap around covers for Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, but in every other way Thompson’s style is totally different. There’s a lot of strong shading used which adds to the texture of the scenes and draws the eye in to search through the shade and lines. This may cause readers to spot more details as they peer closer to make sense of what their eye is telling them. I’m not an art reviewer. I know what I like and I like a lot of different stuff, including Thompson’s art style.

The exploration of diverse areas of Westerfeld’s world and where it takes us

This point could be summed up by ‘Jewish matriarchal ruled society, Lilit, confronting Alek’s (rubbish) contextually realistic ideas about women head on Ahahahaha YAY!’. I hope Angela from Bookish Blather won’t mind if I put her words up here in place of my own inarticulate squeeing:

‘Alek and Deryn become involved in the resistance movement - which introduces my favourite character, the feisty revolutionary Lilit, who has dreams of bringing women's liberation to Istanbul. She also has a huge crush on one of our dashing heroes. Lilit is a young woman destined for greatness and could probably support a whole novel of her own!

That kiss, that knowing kiss from Lilit (ask for spoilers in the comments if you like). Oh. I’m crossing my fingers that Lilit appears in ‘Goliath’ '.

‘Behemoth’ as a second book

Something I didn’t really notice until I got to the end of ‘Behemoth’ is how clever Westerfeld has been in creating the second book of his trilogy. Westerfeld can’t move his overall plot (Alek heading to the Pope to reveal his identity) forward much in this second novel, because he needs to save all that drama to create a satisfying resolution in the final book. ‘Behemoth’, like most other second books in trilogies, has to be kept kind of a static point in the big over arching journey, to forestall too much happening too fast. To achieve this, ‘Behemoth’ effectively becalms the characters in an episodic side adventure that takes place in Istanbul, which contains some twiddly bits that relate to Alek’s main journey but ultimately don’t move that main plot forward too much. While this ‘let’s go off on a totally different story’ approach is part of what makes second books the bane of readers everywhere (I admit it, there aren’t many trilogies I can think of where the second book was my favourite)Westerfeld has packed so much clever plotting and creative action into this separate adventure, that it is near impossible to notice, or care, that the narrative drive behind ‘Behemoth’ barely contributes to Alek’s book spanning quest, or Deryn’s (inevitable, surely) discovery.

Was there anything I didn’t like?

Wellll, I’m still not convinced I like the romance that’s developing between Deryn and Alek. Deryn clearly cares for him and when she feels sad that her social rank would keep them apart, even if Alek knew she was a girl, I felt for her. I want Deryn to have whatever she wants, but I also genuinely like Alek and think they’d make an excellent pair. I’m just annoyed that the necessary plot device of having Deryn conceal her sex means that she’s expressing her awkward romantic affection for Alek, without any reciprocating ‘does she like me, am I being weird, what does this MEAN’ commentary from Alek. The romantic relationship feels unequal, right now. I’m not ruling out falling in love with the resolution to this romance though (or y’know being devastated by love kept apart by circumstances), just proceeding cautiously.

Reviews

The Booksmugglers
Bookish Blather
Jawas Read Too
Forever Young Adult

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A New Year of Feminist Classics and the Indie Lit Awards GLBTQ Shortlist

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:39:53 GMT

There are a couple of projects I’d like to mention quickly, because I’m involved in them and this blog is nothing if not all about me : D

I’m sure lots of you took part in 2011’s ‘Year of Feminist Classics’. If you did hopefully you’ll want to play along again and if you didn’t, perhaps you’d like to add a feminist reading project to your 2012 schedule. This year a host and a group of co-hosts will read and talk about one book every month, starting in February. Check out the list of books below to see what the group will be discussing:

February: ‘Feminism is for Everybody’ - bell hooks (Amy)
March: ‘The Book of the City of Ladies’ - Christine De Pizan (Jean)
April: Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity - Julia Serano (Cass)
May: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë read alongside Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys (Iris)
June: Stone Butch Blues - Leslie Feinberg (Emily)
July: Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (Nancy)
August: The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison (Lauren)
September: Borderlands/La Frontera - Gloria Anzaldua (Melissa)
October: The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan (Jodie)
November: Beyond the Veil - Fatema Mernissi (Ana)
December: Women, Race, and Class - Angela Davis (Emily Jane)
January 2013 – Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity by Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Eva)

You can read all twelve (ohho, aren’t you ambitious?), less than twelve, or if you’ve got a spot of time for a just one feminist classic in, oh, I don’t know, let’s say October, you can join in for the one readalong. Whatever your participation level you’ll be very welcome. Full details at the ‘Year of Feminist Classics’ website.

The Indie Lit Awards Shortlists have been also been announced and here are the books I’ll be reading for the GLBTQ panel.

’Well With My Soul’- Gregory Allen
’Swimming to Chicago’ - David Matthew Barnes
’Songs of the New Depression’ - Kergan Edwards-Stout
’Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender’ - Nick Krieger
’Huntress’ - Malinda Lo

I’d read ‘Huntress’ before this list was finalised and you can read my review of it at ladybusiness.

Happy week everyone – January blues time is almost over!

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'The Knife of Never Letting Go' - Patrick Ness

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:40:10 GMT

I meant to join in the Calico Reaction chat about ‘The Knife of Never Letting Go’ by Patrick Ness, when it ran last year, but even though I’d finished it in plenty of time I didn’t get around to it. I’ll suggest that you go over to her livejournal and read her thoughts on this book, because you’re going to get a lot more information from her (note there are spoilers). I felt the same way she did about a lot of things (loved Ness’ way with creating character voices, the creation of The Noise and the slow reveal that this is a sci-fi novel), but I felt really differently about the emotional impact of this book, but let me start with a quick discussion about the beginning of the book.

This is one of the very rare reviews where I’ll be missing out plot synopsis and going straight into the issues that I need to talk about. As a consequence there will be spoilers and a lack of plot information.

I think Amanda mentioned being put off by the toilet humour on page one and to be honest that kept me from starting this series for ages, because it sounded a little too silly to be my kind of thing. Imagine my shock to find myself giggling as I read this first page exchange:

‘The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say.
“Need a poo, Todd.”
“Shut up, Manchee.”
“Poo. Poo, Todd.”
“I said shut it.”'

I kept replaying it and still finding it funny. I still find it funny now, not because it involves toilet humour, but because the comic composition is spot on. There’s a prelude which encourages you to anticipate what kind of stupid thing the dog is going to say. There’s a ‘not at the dinner table’ statement which encourages shocked surprise and unwitting laughter, but it’s kept short and quick, so you almost wonder if you read it right, ‘Hey, did he just say...?' There’s a snappish retort and there’s insistent repetition from Manchee who is oblivious to how annoying he’s being. Page one and they’re established as a crotchety double act. It’s a little gem of humour and with just a few words, Ness illuminates the place Manchee and Todd’s relationship begins from. I knew I’d be hooked on Todd and Manchee’s voices throughout the book.

I’d seen a lot of talk about Manchee’s death scene breaking hearts before I started ‘The Knife of Never Letting Go’, but I just didn’t feel it, even though I loved spending time with Manchee. By the time the book reaches Manchee’s death I was totally desensitised to the emotion that scene was supposed to evoke. I didn’t fail to react because I loved Manchee any less, or because I didn’t believe how Todd and Manchee’s relationship had developed. I just, couldn’t feel anymore because Ness had over played his emotional hand with me.

Ness’ plot relies on tension that is created by sets of negative incidents, which make Todd and Viola mobilise and positive incidents, which allow them to rest and learn. Something bad happens and Todd and Viola find themselves running for their lives, but then something good happens, for example they a town that will shelter them/ At the end of a pair of negative/positive events the cycle begins again, with a new (and often even worse) negative event, which disrupts the character’s ability to rest at peace, like the army tracing them and destroying the town. And so on and on and on throughout the novel. As the book continues, the negative incidents escalate in seriousness, as Ness builds to what he wants to be an emotionally violent climax that will both devastate his reader and convince them they have to know what happens in the next book.

The trouble is, I found that the shock of the characters being lulled into feeling secure, only to be shocked into action when their safety turns out to be false is a trick that can only be used on me so many times, before it becomes wearying and repetitive. The book slips into a regular pattern which is kind of like reading a novelised version of the ‘Fortunately, Unfortunately’ writing game. Once I could see the pattern, I found that when Todd and Viola had to run from danger fro the third, or the fourth, or the fifth time, I was less emotionally affected. Predictability isn’t usually a huge factor in my own connection with a book (you can almost always tell who is going to end up together, in a novel with a romance, but I have no problem connecting with relationships in novels) but I had real problems with the repeating pattern in ‘The Knife of Never Letting Go’. Its structure of fear and relief kind of reminded me of the way slasher movies work. It is a really effective structure to employ, but it just didn’t work for me here, maybe because the length of the novel means the trick is repeated too many times before it reaches the end. I’m not quite sure, but I think seeing so many scary, bad things jump on Viola and Todd lessened my response to what they went through and cut me off from the novel a little bit. When Manchee died I was braced for it and didn’t let it get to my heart. I’m afraid you have to trick me to make me cry Mr Ness and your trick was played too early and too often.

So, by the time the novel got to Manchee’s death I couldn’t feel the real consequences of the painful things that happened in this novel anymore. I put a lot of that down to the fact that Ness’ villain Aaron just.wouldn’t.die. Every time I thought he had to be dead, he’d reappear (again, like the villain in a slasher film). It began to feel like even really life threatening encounters had limited consequences in Ness’ world. At one point Aaron is dragged under water by a gator and he still survives. So when Manchee was shown dying, I had a hard time believing he had actually died at first and when I finally accepted that he wasn’t coming back I was too far away from his death to really go back and unpack the emotions I would have felt about being there, watching his neck get snapped.

I realise I’ve gone really negative and possibly unnecessarily specific in this post, because I had to talk about this unintentional emotional blocking, as it’s what really kept me from LOVING this book. I want to write balanced reviews, but sometimes I just have to screw that and treat my book blog as a journal where I can talk at length about the issue I really want to get off my chest because it is going around and around in my head.

So, alongside everything that I’ve said in this review please note the following caps lock: I LIKED SO MANY THINGS SO MUCH, I WANT TO READ THE NEXT BOOK VERY SOON (Oh um I actually ordered it after realising how true that caps locking was). I’m totally in the ‘Chaos Walking’ fan club. Hopefully, I’ll reread the whole trilogy once I reach the end and then, prepared for an emotional disconnect, I’ll have time to come back and talk about all the interesting technical things Ness does in this book. I’d also really like to talk about the growing relationships between Violet and Todd, Todd and Manchee , as well as voice, but for now I’ll just have to refer you back to Calico Reaction’s post and the comments everyone left there (this is a case of ‘do read the comments’). Cross your fingers that I finish the trilogy soon, so I can get down to rereading it before 2015.

Other Reviews
Iris On Books
things mean a lot
books I done read
Jenny’s Books
Calico Reaction

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One Sentence Reviews - Catching Up On 2011

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:39:35 GMT

Eva from 'A Striped Armchair' has kindly said that I can try out her useful one sentence review style in this post, so that I can catch you up on my thoughts about some of the books I never quite got around to reviewing in 2011. Time for me to let loose with one of my favourite, forbidden, forms of writing (the run on sentence).

Books I Loved and Found Every Page a Delight

Read 'A Fine Balance' by Rohinton Mistry if you enjoy big family saga narratives, set in India, that have multiple storylines, like 'A Suitable Boy', but you want a novel that looks at the realities of being a poorer member of Indian society.

Reread 'Persuasion' by Jane Austen if you need a reminder that even in Austen's time quiet but strong, on the shelf heroines could get the guy ;) For a more in depth look at one of the greatest stories ever told you should check out the series of posts Book Snob put up during the Persuasion readalong that she held last year: First Impressions, Emotion and Persuasion's Men

Reread 'Jazz' by Toni Morisson if you're looking for a literary novel full of drama, with a distinctive narrative style, which successfully calls forth empathy for people who can at times be rather unpleasant.

Books I Would Have Loved, Except for One or Two Little Quibbles or Books I Really, Really Liked

Read 'The Locusts Have No King' by Dawn Powell if you liked Powell's 'The Happy Island', or you enjoy satires about people who may have taken a wrong turn and reached bittersweet endings.

Read 'Miss Hargreaves' by Frank Baker if you fancy a fun farce mixed with fantasy, populated by a set of characters who sometimes test a readers' patience.

Read 'Iceland' by Betsy Tobin if you love straight mythic retellings, written in modern language, that are told from a female perspective and are in the mood for a rather breezy read.

Books I Definitely Liked, Although They Didn’t Blow Me Away or Books that had Great Points Counterbalanced by Not-Great Ones

Read 'Wild Life' by Molly Gloss if you'd like to read a novel which contains a touch of sci-fi/fantasy and follows a female writer with progressive ideas, trying to carve a space to write in and you don't mind a bit of a meandering plot.

Books That Aren’t For Me but I Could Still See Some Good Points

Read 'Journey By Moonlight' by Antal Szerb if you're interested in creepy family relations, or past obsessive love, with bleeds into the present, souring life and you can put up with a bit of a self-indulgent narrator.

Read 'Have His Carcase' by Dorothy L Sayers if you loved 'Strong Poison', (which I did and you can read a bit about why in my post on 'Strong Poison') so you want to make sure you know everything that's happened between Harriet and Peter before you read 'Gaudy Night', which means you’re fine with a mystery plot that is nonsensical and takes too long to unravel.

Read 'My Legendary Girlfriend' by Mike Gayle if you're looking for a funny story about a guy in his mid twenties and you don't mind that his main focus is still the girl who dumped him two years ago, or that the comparisons between this book and 'Bridget Jones' on the back cover are mistaken, because if Bridget had spent a whole novel going on about a man who had broken up with her two years ago, who she doesn't even see for most of the book, then she would have been called a stalker, or a whiner and the book would never have sold as well because double standards exist, but also because she would have been really dull.

*Ahem*. That last one got a bit out of control, didn't it?

Thanks so much for letting me have a go at this format Eva. If I can ever do you a blogging favour just ask.

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Christmas Books

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:39:35 GMT

Best to return from the festive break with a little bit of book bragging I think.

‘Fingersmith’ – Sarah Waters: My third Waters novel and I know certain Waters fans are looking forward to seeing me read this one.

‘The Kingdom of Gods’ – N K Jemisin: The final volume of Jemisin’s exciting ‘Inheritance’ trilogy. I get to spend a whole book with Seih, the weird and wonderful child god, this time and I am just a little bit excited. I can’t thank Meghan enough for getting me into these books.

‘Sense and Sensibility’ – Jane Austen: I shall feel so sophisticated when pulling my new Penguin Clothbound edition of this classic out of my bag, um, when I get around to reading it. I really have got to read a new Austen this year as I’ve now got ‘S&S’ and ‘Emma’ lying about unread.

‘Wading Home’ – Rosalyn Story: This is a lesser know title, about a man’s search for his father, in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina ripped through the city. It was enthusiastically praised at Read Red for its descriptions of nature.

‘The Invisible Ones’ - Stef Penney: Finally, a second novel from Stef Penny! I enjoyed ‘The Tenderness of Wolves’ so much and hope very much for an equally humane and complex thriller.

I hope you all got lovely presents (I know lots of you did, because I’ve been checking out your posts). And now myfriendamy gets an extra one, as she’s the winner of my blogiversary giveaway. E-mail me your posting address (my e-mail is in my profile) and I’ll send a copy of 'The Map of My Dead Pilots' out in February.

If you want to see me chatting a little bit about ‘Strong Poison’ by Dorothy L Sayers as a gift to Nymeth in her birthday month, then you can drop by Lady Business. Otherwise I’ll see you here at Bookgazing next week with my attempt to quickly clear out many of those review hangovers from last year.

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Third Year Here

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 23:03:36 GMT

I’m back briefly to announce that tomorrow is my third blogiversary. I remembered I had to go to work Friday (for half a day, don’t weep for me and my interrupted holiday too hard will you) and would probably spend the afternoon lounging with the ‘rents. So, I am going to pretend it is perfectly acceptable to post about my blogging anniversary a day later, just like it was totally fine to open my Secret Santa present from a friend on Christmas Eve. Absolutely fine.

Spending time with my parents has been the unofficial and very nice theme of my long Christmas break. I meant to write posts. I did not write posts. I was planning to catch up on all the box sets and “free” films I have sitting around that no one else wants to watch. Instead I watched all the Christmas tv downstairs. I went out for lunch and to the pub a few times with friend, but otherwise there has been lots of family time. Although we live in the same house, work means we spend plenty of time apart and it has been nice to chill in each other presence and occasionally leave the house together.

Anyway, I’m getting away from the subject. This year has probably been the year where I blogged the least since I started Bookgazing, but it has seen the most exciting change to the place in some time: I moved to Dreamwidth. I anticipated having to do the requisite wailing and gnashing penance that everyone who moves service must endure, but instead found the transition exceptionally smooth. I had two very pleasant years at Blogger, but I must admit I do like being back in an atmosphere that has diverged from a Livejournal base. It just suits me better.

Thank you so much to everyone for sticking with me through the move. I came over here because I wanted a fresh start, but I absolutely didn’t want to lose any of the people who regularly dropped by and it looks like those I talk to regularly are managing to make themselves heard in the comments. I have heard there might be some Open ID problems (Wordpress addresses maybe?) and wanted to mention that if you fancy setting up a Dreamwidth account yourself, just to make commenting easier, Dreamwidth is currently letting new people make free accounts without an invite code until 31/12/2011. Just head over to the homepage.

To finish, I thought I’d offer up a little giveaway to you for following me to my new home, continuing to chat with me after my frequent silences this year and just for being nice people. One of my absolute favourite books this year was by someone who has been blogging and writing about books for ages, Colleen Mondor from Chasing Ray. I’ve been reading her blog for, oh, about five years now and I was so excited to get to read her book. Now I want to offer you all a chance to win a beautiful, shiny hardback copy of her creative non-fiction title ‘Map of My Dead Pilots’, which I just do not have enough nice words for (although I will try to use many in my review in the New Year).

I never read non-fiction, but I swallowed this during over several lunchtime sessions and have plans to read it again next year. You want this book.

To be in with a chance of winning simply say something pleasant in the comments on this post before midnight GMT on 3rd of Jan 2012 (the day before I go back to work properly). This contest is open worldwide.

I hope you’ve all had a lovely festive season and are looking forward to the New Year. See you in January, when I’ll have lots of reading news to regale you with.

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2011 in Lists and Stats

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:06:23 GMT

2011 is nearly over; it can't be avoided anymore. Christmas cards are finally in the post and we're all beginning to gather for parties and
final meetings before Olympics Year begins. Does anyone else feel better going into an even number year? It just seems so much neater to me. Before I run off to unwrap my presents and well let's be honest eat my weight in food I thought I'd join in with a blog tradition and post my top reads of the year.

I had a stellar reading year in 2011 and it was beyond easy to fill my top 10 lists for adult and young adult. Like last year these lists are in no particular order and there are two separate lists because that means I get to include more books, not because young adult can't hack a comparison with adult lit. I also stuck an honourable mention list in this year to highlight some of the books that would have made the top 10 if the competition hadn't been so fiendishly fierce this year.

Adult

1.'Map of My Dead Pilots' – Coleen Mondor (look out for a review of this one and a blogiversary giveaway next week)
2. 'The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms' - N K Jemisin
3. 'The Summer Book' - Tove Jansson
4. 'The Dispossessed' - Ursula K Le Guin
5. 'Dimanche & Other Stories' - Irene Nemirovsky
6. 'Tomorrow Pamplona' - Jan Van Mersbergen
7. 'The Night Watch' - Sarah Waters
8. 'Kraken' – China Mieville
9. Motherlines - Suzy McKee Charnas
10.Even the Dogs - Jon McGregor (review pending)

YA/books for younger readers

1. 'Will Grayson, Will Grayson' - John Green & David Leviathan
2. 'Huntress' - Malinda Lo
3.The Knife of Never Letting Go - Patrick Ness (I will eventually post my review for this Ana)
4. 'Fury of the Phoenix' - Cindy Pon
5. 'Slice of Cherry' - Dia Reeves
6. 'Homicide Related' - Norah McClintock
7. 'Shipbreaker' - Paulo Bacigalupi
8.Spirit Walker – Michelle Paver (review pending)
9. 'The Body at the Tower' - Y S Lee
10.Behemoth - Scott Westerfeld (review pending, gah I wrote this three months ago, why haven't I put it up yet?)

Honourable mentions and re-reads

1.Iceland - Betsy Tobin (short review soon)
2.Persuasion - Jane Austen (reread)
3.Jazz - Toni Morrison (reread)
4.Strong Poison - Dorothy L Sayers (and I am definitely reviewing this in the New Year Ana, eeep)
5. 'Coconut Unlimited' - Nikesh Shukla
6. 'Dark Matter' - Michelle Paver
7. 'To Say Nothing of the Dog' - Connie Willis
8. 'What I was' - Meg Rosoff

I know that an honourable mentions list shouldn't be almost as long as my main lists, but what can I say? I'm just a huge cheater, who's had a
very good year of books.

I also thought I'd show you some significant stats for my reading year. I wanted to increase some of the things I read (male authors, sci-fi by women etc), but looking at my stats
I had some seriously mixed results.

Stats

Total Books read:66

Male author: 26
Instances of books written by same author: 2 books Scott Westerfeld
Female author:40
Instances of books written by same author: 2 books Toni Morrison, 2 books Y S Lee, 2 books N K Jemisin, 2 books Michelle Paver

I was doing really well at keeping the m/f ratio much closer than last year until about October and then I sort of let it go. I find it hard to feel too bad about missing this goal, but I would like to have done better.

GLBTQ characters (total): 25
The main character (where the narrator, or protagonist is GLBTQ): 12

I wasn't measuring how many novels I read with GLBTQ characters in them last year, so this is the benchmark I want to increase from next year.

Books by authors who are a different race from me: 19
Instances of books written by same author: 2 books Toni Morrison, 2 books Y S Lee, 2 books N K Jemisin

Last year I read 23 books by authors whose race was different from mine and I wanted to increase that total, but I didn't. Part of the reason I didn't read more books that fit this category was because I was trying not to buy new books, which meant reading from the bookshelves in my house and those as it turns out are predominantly full of books by white authors. I encourage you to check your own book shelves. We have a lot of books and I would have expected a small percentage to be by authors who aren't white. I was a little surprised to find only about 30 books, among hundreds. Next year, I'm planning on more trips to the library and more careful book buying, so that I can increase this total.

Non-fiction: 1

Not exactly unexpected. Next year I have a non-fiction plan. Hurray!

Translated fiction: 8

I wanted to read more translated fiction and it wasn't hard to increase this total, considering that I read 2 pieces of translated fiction in
2010. Goal completed and I hope I'll continue to read books originally written in a language other than English.

Scifi (total): 10
Male author:7
Female author: 3

I genuinely don't know how this happened. I bought a lot of science fiction written by women. I signed up for a challenge so I'd read more. Yet
I didn't read more sci-fi and I read significantly less sci-fi by women than by men. Changing things is tricky it seems. I have a plan to turn this around next year. Hurray plans! Definitely not too many plans made for 2012.

So, there you have it, things I liked and things I want to do more of next year. Bookgazing will hopefully be more active in the New Year than it has been in 2011 (I am counting on the balancing forces of an even numbered year) at least I have some reviews written up that I didn't manage to put up this year, so January will be full of me talking at least :) Have a lovely festive season everyone and see you in the comments section. I am out of blogging until the 30th!

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Bookish Chat: 'Kraken' - China Miéville

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:54:26 GMT

Maree from just add books and I had such fun last year reading 'The City & The City' together by China Miéville, that we went back for a second go, with his novel 'Kraken'.

As I put it: “yep we are engaged in slashing the work of a much worshipped experimental sci-fi writer. We rock :)”

Let’s do this.

Maree: I thought we could start by talking in general about how Kraken subverts the norm of giant-monster books. I'm thinking of things like Relic (though, disclaimer, I haven't read Relic) wherein there's an expert - usually a gorgeous woman - who teams up with, say, a handsome FBI agent and they run around the city shooting things and shagging.

And this ... is not that.

First, Billy is such an everyman. I mean he has the job of looking after the giant squid, but he's fairly ordinary. Until ... he's not. I found Billy's reaction to his not-ordinariness interesting. Like, after a very short while, he's okay with it and actually starts using it ... but I'm getting off-track.

So - Billy. What do we think?

Jodie: Even bigger disclaimer, I don’t think I’ve ever read any other giant monster hunt books although I’ve seen a few films that feature that kind of story line. But I totally recognise the ‘handsome dude/ sexahy and learned lady’ team trope from oh I don’t know a billion other genres (most popular right now, the historical mystery involving some kind of creepy cult). Let me say that I am incredibly glad that ‘Kraken’ is not that. I’m not sure I’d enjoy two weeks of crawling through a 481 large page version of ‘National Treasure’, even though that film is a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

It’s not like Miéville is above tropes and well worn pathways. He gives us a well used heroic type in Billy. Like you say he’s the everyman, who then turns out to be the special snowflake of destiny. Except Billy’s specialness eventually turns out to be so, I don’t know, mundane, almost (although what he can do is still pretty impressive) that it kind of messes with the familiar ‘everyday hero’ type of fantasy and sci-fi. He starts out thinking he’s a regular curator, is then told he’s the kraken prophet given visions by an ancient arthropod god, only to find out that in fact he’s the bottle prophet, linked to…sure an ancient angel of memory, but specifically one that’s created from jars and has been reduced to a tiny sculpture by the end of the novel.

Even, when he’s finally saving the world, he has to laugh at the ridiculous loophole that being the bottle prophet gifts to him as he stops an apocalypse with semantics, a twisting of words, a reducing the mythical kraken god to something very ordinary.

That kind of trickery reminds me a lot of Terry Pratchett’s books where heroes and heroines often win with a clever twist of logic, that is tied up with ‘head magic’ which reconfigures the world through words and convincing. I thought it was so clever.

So, Billy, yeah I started out really unimpressed with his character creation. He seemed to have no real connections, or past and initially felt like a vessel for Miéville to pour clever ideas into. By the end of the book, both he and Miéville’s world felt like they’d been on a journey of development from ideas and details to true reality and turned into something the reader could care about. How did you feel about him by the end of the book?

Maree: It is rather mundane in the end isn't it? After all the magic and the knack; there's a loophole.

Mmm ... at first, I didn't really have an opinion on Billy because he's kind of a cypher. He's reactive and kind of passive, and, like you say; has no real connections. He obviously has no family, and his only real relationship outside of work is with Leon and, by extension, Marge.

It's interesting that it's the search for the kraken that makes Billy start FORGING connections. There's Dane the Awesome of course, but also the Londonmancers and - to a much lesser extent - the police.

He starts to flesh out as a character when he starts to believe in - not in the kraken-as-prophet so much; but in ... the magical underworld?

Can we talk about the police? I'm really ambivalent on the police in this and I'm trying to work out why …

Jodie: 'It's interesting that it's the search for the kraken that makes Billy start FORGING connections.'

I love this idea, like Billy gets his very own apocalypse so that he can make friends and become more of a connected person :)

We can totally talk about the police! I like Collingswood, but like is absolutely the wrong word. I find her endlessly interesting. It's not just the knack that first sparked my interest (although the magic in this book is really original), but the way that she's such an imperfect knacker and she knows it. I'm so used to seeing the all powerful wizard character, or the comic bumbling wizard who never the less probably saves the world and Collingswood the self-assured, irreverant, swearing, medium ability knacker is so different.

However I don't think the force are exactly fabulous examples of what we all hope from the police. Let’s just say they don't appear to have been on any kind of sensitivity course.They’re pretty inactive and seem to appear less and less as the book goes on. I guess that’s because they're struggling with the case....

Maree: Yes! Kraken is as much - or more - of Billy's journey as it is about the impending apocalypse.

Collingswood was great; but I wanted a little more character development for her, I think? I loved her attitude, and her imperfect knack and her kind of ... ass-kicking competence, if that makes any sense.

Her boss turned out to be slightly useless and as for Vardy ... it's almost like Mieville would almost forget they were there and then jam them back in again - lol.

Could you imagine Collingswood on a sensitivity course???

I want to talk about Dane, but I want to talk about Dane A LOT, so before we get to his awesomeness, can we talk about the things that creeped us the fuck out?

Starting, of course, with Tattoo .... the thought of which still makes me shudder a bit.

Jodie:After finishing the book I figured Vardy was pushed into the background so we'd get a huge impact when his evil plan was revealed. In that moment where Billy works it out and finds Vardy, all those moments where Vardy disappears with a gleam in his eye take on so much more significance. But it does also feel like Mieville is like, I need a shocking ending...who would no one suspect...oh how about Vardy the guy we haven't seen for ages. That's just speculation though.

But her boss, yeah I'm not sure what happened there. I guess the way her boss, Baron, crumbles allows Collingswood more agency and to take her rightful place as lead officer. I would have liked a little more character development as well, maybe some more about her life outside the story would have helped? I did like the way she doubts though - she has a worry, then kind of goes 'fuck that, no time for that' and picks up her surly, quipping persona again. It's not like she uses that personality to fake it in the police and mask who she really is. She really is that Landan geezer type of lady, but she definitely sometimes squashes things down and goes out harder than she maybe feels. Does that make sense?

Creepy things: The Tattoo is mental right? I really loved when Paul escaped and we got to learn more about him, because that made the whole 'man trapped in skin of other man' thing extra freaky. I felt for Paul when he was that nameless, handcuffed man, but I was so involved in his story once we got a little bit more detail. I've never seen an author write 'man trapped as tattoo' before, have you? And I thought it was so inventive to have other people transformed into machines (also very disturbing) in the workshop.

We've got to talk about Goss and Subby, if we're talking creepy things right? Aren't they disturbing?

Maree: Generally, I'm not a big fan of minor character suddenly revealed as evil mastermind, but it sort of makes sense here, especially with the way Vardy is described in the first few chapters, which I JUST remembered. By the end of the book, though, I'd kind of forgotten that
and on first reading went ... 'Huh', because it can be kind of a lazy plot-point.

Vardy is definitely absent more than he's present as the book progresses, which does dovetail rather nicely.

The Tattoo thing is highly original - and creepy in the badwrong way. I love that we get to know the guy as well, and that he forms a kind of strange bond with Marge - both people who got drawn into the magic underworld - for want of a better term - more or less against their
will. The radio men - that's haunting for some reason. Moreso than Tattoo, for me. Not sure why.

Goss and Subby ... now there's a force of nature. Or, well, a force of evil, really. Like there's a certain ... purity? to their evil. I mean, they have no redeeming qualities. At all. And Goss EATS PEOPLE because he can.

They're obviously some kind of spiritual/demonic force, but I love how that backstory isn't explained - they're just there, and menacing which makes it all 100% more creepy and skin-shivery.

Aside from Awesome Dane, I think my favourite character was Wati. I loved how mundane some of his interactions were - from things like pez dispensers and Kirk dolls - because he was organinsing a strike while everyone else was waiting for the apocalypse. A STRIKE.

I ... have no point other than that - lol

Jodie: Yeah I'm not quite sure how to feel about Vardy's part in the ending, because of the Miéville wrote it. Is he really skillfully leading us down the wrong path, by removing Vardy from the story so much, or does he just need that final unguessable twist and hey, turns out it's Vardy? Like you said the way he acts at the beginning seems to argue for the first interpretation, the way his life is explained (he had a cult and lost it, now he's mad that he can't unknow that his cult's apocalypse was wrong, but every time he's asked to infiltrate a cult for just a few days he almost believes again). I think there's a moment about 3/4 in where he suddenly has to go, because he's 'on to something' that made me pause. Still...maybe we are undecided on this point?

I love Wati and the strike too. It's not the kind of thing you see in novels about sci-fi, or fantasy, even like urban fantasy with its combination of real life and magical happenings is surprisingly low on explicit moments of social protest. It reminded me a little bit of the 'Undead, but not Unpeople' protest in Pratchett's 'Reaper Man'. Actually quite a lot of this book reminded me of a more sweary Pratchett - Collingswood's weird sense of humour in what seem like totally horrific circumstances, some of the sci-fi details like the strike and the chameleon guy, which are so odd and out there, but also kind of adorable, the importance of myth creation and just the general tone which goes into humour and quiet story telling...what do you think?

I think Wati is probably one of the most well developed characters in 'Kraken', because like Dane (the Dane squee fest is coming soon, right?) he has a back story, connections and passions. I guess it makes sense that Billy doesn't seem to have all those things (although obviously he's passionate about science and his work at the museum) given what we know about how his real origins (born to someone human that we never meet) are kind of subsumed by the origins the museum's angel of memory believes in (the story he makes up about being the product of a 'gone wrong' first attempt at test tube birth). He's sort of birthed from a myth he makes real himself and as a result I guess it makes sense that his story in 'Kraken' keeps from describing anything that isn't relevant to that myth. Wait, does that make sense, do you think, or have I gone off on a weird ramble?

The woman who has been turned into a phone is the absolute creepiest, missing a soul creature that The Tattoo creates for me, but yes the radio people! They're just stripped of their humanity and when I first heard about the workshop I shuddered, because ugh. One of the most disturbing elements of crime novels is when a victim is taken away to be 'worked on', tortured and pulled apart and I guess that even though in this novel lots of the people who become machines supposedly go there willingly, that kind of idea echoes in this part of the Tattoo's enterprise.

Ugh Goss and Subby, the bit where he folds the guy in on himself. And the part where he eats Leon and you're like 'what just happened, surely there must be more to Leon's story than this, he'll be back' but he never is, he's just snuffed out. I really admire stories that do that, no backsies on death thing, even if they are pretty hard to take. Which I guess leads us nicely onto Dane the big goddamn (tragic) hero that he is...

Maree: I'm not sure either. I'm inclined to tilt towards clever, because Miéville IS clever and I want to believe - lol. But the jury is definitely still out on that one.

Wati and his strike is very Pratchett, I agree. I've only read about 10 Discworld novels (I'm slowly working my way through) and that whole ... magic in the mundane? thing is vintage Pratchett (as near as I can tell). Like Collingswood who - on the surface - is a somewhat irreverent cop, but there's clearly more because of her knack which is so very imperfect but so very Collingswood at the same time. And yes - Wati is very three-dimensional, if you'll excuse the pun - lol. He has almost no corporeal form at all, yet he's possibly the most well-realised character of the book.

Billy, in a way, (I think) remains a bit of a cypher. He has knack he didn't know about; like you say he was born from a myth in a way - and in the end he IS the myth, or the kraken, or the god, in a very real way and - that reminds me; I wanted to see more of the angel of memory because if you want a tragic figure ... I mean; getting smaller and smaller until it's really just this little, pathetic collection of bones ...

Okay. LET THE DANE-SQUEE BEGIN.

Jodie: (Ooo I love that last part of your e-mail, about the tragic smaller and smaller bottle figure, but am no longer resist the urge to squee, so...)

OMG DANE! I love Dane. He is a rogue soldier for the church of kraken for krakens sake - how was I ever going to resist? He really believes in his terribly strange faith and has feeeelings about the way to treat a kraken. And he has so much great back story, complete with stories about his sweet, ex-soldier of fortune grand dad. One of my favourite bits was when Dane told the story about his granddad asking him to pick his favourite saint - so oddly sweet and...full of male feelings.

We are agreed that Dane and Billy are total slash fodder right? And that Dane is ripped?;)

Maree: DANE!! Lol I think we contained our squee pretty well. How much do we LOVE DANE???

He's so ... solid in his kraken-faith, once we realise he's actually on Billy's side and not a creepy cult stalker type.

You know he's totally built and can kill you five different ways with a toothpick ... uhm. I may be projecting, but he's definitely bamf and he believes in Billy so much and I can't NOT slash them, you know? Honestly I'm THISCLOSE to writing fic because they're so, so perfect for each other in a lot of ways.

And when Billy is like ... we're going to save him, and doesn't even hesitate ... yeah. I don't care what anyone says. That's true love.

Jodie: True, true love. (I feel like we need some appropriate slash gif here, but the best I could come up with was this:

OMG write the fic! I would read it, you would draw all these people into Miéville's weird world, they would get the book and then they would gaze around in confusion. 'Where have you brought us Maree? Why...why is that guy's back talking?!'

I expected to find Dane's faith kind of distancing as a girl with very few personal connections to religion (and one who thinks worshipping a squid god is one of the many definitions of weird), but like you say his faith is so set. And not in the typical obsessive, creepy way we tend to see in religious fanatic characters, even though he does some pretty extreme things for his cause (turning into a squid at the end and dying, was out there, but still so kind of heroic). Interesting that he's a warrior/worshipper of the old style, like a crusader but without the urge to convert...Idk how did you feel about Dane and his religion?

Maree: BOYFRIENDS. And I'm talking about both Billy and Dane and Gwaine and Merlin - lol.

I was raised Catholic so I'm pretty comfortable with religious imagery. I love that Dane's ... I mean, he's a fanatic, in a way, he's definitely one of the faithful but he's not batshit crazy, if that makes sense. Like, his faith is one of his bedrocks and he never, ever questions it, which makes him just that much more awesome and bamf, somehow.

Because normally, the religious nutters in books are, well … nutters. But there's something pure about Dane's faith. He's what I imagine old-school crusaders (er, apart from the whole needing to convert the evil Jews thing obv) were like: he's a TRUE soldier of his lord. And his faith in Billy ... like, he's just THERE for Billy all the time and I can't describe the joy of it. And even BILLY knows how much Dane is there for him and I just. I NEED FIC OKAY.

Jodie: Yes one piece really isn’t enough. I wonder who we could pull in to write us more... Oh hi renay! (YAY, RENAY - Maree)

In conclusion Dane is hot, 'Kraken' is fantastic and it’s a good job neither of us has any regular slash averse sci-fi fanboy readers ;) Do we agree to meet back next year to hopefully continue our unabashed Miéville squeeing?

Maree:Your conclusions are correct. Slash-averse sci-fi fanboy readers don’t know what they’re missing :-)

Yessss. We have a date with Iron Council in March.

And finally:

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Indie Lit Awards 2012 - The Final Stretch

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:51:19 GMT

Just a quick announcement to say that it’s your last chance to nominate books for the Indie Lit awards. While I’d love it if you’d nominate some awesome books for the GLBTQ, so I get to read them when the judging group begins deliberations, there are lots of other exciting categories.

Nominations close on 31st December 2011.

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